


The Prodigal Year

by basset_voyager



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Major Original Character(s), Siblings, i guess, ships are pretty background
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:47:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25711597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: The Hargreeves siblings are brought back together years earlier to deal with the death not of their father, but of another brother. Lies, cult activity, ghosts, and theft of the good silverware ensues.Or, what if Reginald hadn't been able to save Luther?
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Klaus Hargreeves/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 19
Kudos: 134





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Love these siblings! 
> 
> No romantic Luther/Allison. Five doesn't directly appear but he's in some flashbacks. I never got around to watching season 2; these characters are just mine now.

Hargreeves had left Pogo and Grace alone with the body. Pogo rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands in the sink, plunging his arms into the deep basin up to the elbow, while Grace hung up her plastic apron and smoothed out her skirt with her palms. Silence filled up the infirmary like a gas. He remembered how she’d been when Ben died: the picture of fortitude. She’d had the other children to comfort then.

“I should make dinner,” Grace said. Somewhere else in the house, a door slammed, an explosion on a distant battlefield.

Pogo looked up from toweling the water out of his fur. “Grace, it’s nearly ten.”

“Oh. Of course. Silly me.” 

Luther lay on the table. Grace had cut the remains of his jumpsuit away from his body so it resembled a half-open cocoon. The skin of his bare chest was raw with burns from navel to shoulder: the unfinished moth, not meant to be seen. His hands were open. Pogo wished he could pretend Luther was sleeping, but his position was all wrong; as a child, Luther had always slept splayed out on his stomach, face pressed into the pillow. He’d been the drooler of the bunch. The most unfussy baby, Pogo recalled.

The adrenaline from the panic was fading, and Pogo’s back ached. He wanted to sleep for days.

“There are phone calls to make,” he said. Grace nodded down at the black-and-white Escher tile. She sat perfectly in the chair next to the gurney, ankles crossed and hands folded neatly in her lap. Her dress was the color of bubblegum. Pogo crossed to the desk at the back of the room and took the pen out of the notebook so he could close it. He needed to call the coroner, and a statement would have to be drafted for the press. And the children – the only one whose phone number he had in the little book he kept in his office was Diego, although Vanya might be in the yellow pages. They shouldn’t hear about it on the news.

A lamp still shone on Luther’s body like a spotlight, illuminating the boiled skin on his shoulders, the wrongness of his pose.

“We should cover him up,” suggested Pogo.

“No, let’s not,” Grace said. She reached out and placed her hand on Luther’s forehead. “He looks so sweet when he’s sleeping.”

Neither Pogo nor Grace were the type to cry. Grace didn’t have the ability to produce tears at all, and Pogo had never developed the instinct to link them to sentiments. So they waited in stillness for Hargreeves to return, for what felt like a long time, in the room with the dead boy. Another dead boy. There would be no fresh tomatoes this summer, Pogo thought pointlessly, if Luther was not there to help him with the greenhouse.

Pogo searched for something to say, but the exhausted quietness he’d felt lurking for years in the corners of the house had finally taken up residence in the air, and so he closed his eyes, ashamed as he did it, and said nothing.


	2. Diego

Diego missed Pogo’s call, out with Eudora. For once, they’d gone to dinner, and then a late movie, a date activity so normal that Diego hadn’t been sure whether people really did it or if it was just a fantasy of 80s television. They didn’t see Allison’s new film, which Diego was avoiding, although there was a life-size cardboard cutout of her in the lobby that Diego’s eyes kept catching on the whole time they were in line for popcorn. She was dressed up in a Star Trek uniform, playing whoever the lone Black woman in the original Star Trek was, he couldn’t remember, a toy gun at her hip and her chest thrust forward in what Diego was going to be generous and call a stance of pride. Her hair had been pulled away from her forehead, but the small scar he knew she had at her hairline (she’d been thrown at sixteen by some dude in a deeply lame mech suit, gotten a concussion, and been forced to spend three weeks sitting in bed and trying not to think while their dad wrung his hands about whether or not it would affect her powers, which it didn’t) had been smoothed away by an editor. He pictured an old man in bug-like jeweler’s glasses, scouring his sister’s picture for flaws.

“Is that weird?” Eudora asked, following his gaze.

“Huh? Oh. Nah, it doesn’t even really look like her.” His reply plunked down into the Allison-shaped hole that had opened up unexpectedly somewhere inside of him. If he wasn’t careful, the hole would open up to include Klaus, then Vanya, all the way to Pogo, like falling through a succession of doorways in the dark. He glared at Allison’s glossy face – bored with the photoshoot, he could tell; she was doing that thing with her mouth – as if the photograph itself had the power to rumor him into missing her.

They got their popcorn. Eudora, because she was a total freak, got cheese on it.

“Who doesn’t like cheese?” Eudora had a tendency to talk with her mouth full, which was something Diego’s father had always described as vulgar and policed with a zeal he usually reserved for combat drills. The first time Diego had seen Eudora tell a story through a full bite of jelly donut, his dick had twitched at 10am in a Krispy Kreme. This was not something he had told her.

“I like cheese, it’s just the wrong context.” A kid bumped into the cutout as they walked by, causing Allison to swing back and then forward again in a puppet’s laugh.

“There’s never a wrong context for cheese,” Eudora said. 

“Uh, on an orange.”

She laughed. “Fine, I’ll give you that one.”

The movie was a comedy (kind of) and romantic (vaguely). It was about a man and a woman who both had a tendency to yell a lot learning to ballroom dance so they could do some kind of competition that they were, at the end, confusingly happy to lose. Diego spent most of the film with his hand awkwardly sideways on the armrest, open-palmed. Should he touch her? Should he wait for her to touch him? It wasn’t like he hadn’t had a girlfriend before, he’d just never done _this_ thing, which seemed to be couched in some kind of ritual for which his education had failed to prepare him. Besides, they’d done everything backwards: he’d seen her naked dozens of times, but holding her hand seemed so catastrophically stupid that if he tried it, maybe she’d laugh and never call him again. It felt like he’d been dropped into a rewinding movie and was now trying to discern the plot by watching all the people getting sucked back down hallways, recalling their bullets, un-embracing.

Eudora bumped his knee with her knee. His stomach flipped like a teenager’s. He had the exhilarating, terrifying thought that he loved her. The way she put her feet up on the seat in front of her but only after making sure the theater was empty enough that nobody would need it, the polite but immovable way she would disagree with you, how cute she looked in her uniform, her diligent and logical approach to problems, her little superstitions, her laugh, the way she didn’t shave her legs or her – Diego searched for a word a grown-ass man would use but kept getting stuck on _pussy_ – and how that felt like a secret between them, tangled and ordinary and lovely.

“Yeah, that was cool, I guess,” Diego said as they drifted out of the theater with the rest of the crowd. He didn’t look at the cardboard cutout of Allison, or the poster of her out front.

“My cousin Nina probably has some kind of feelings about it as a representation of bipolar,” said Eudora. “I’ll have to ask her when I see her.”

It had gotten dark since they’d gone inside. Diego watched Eudora’s hand swinging at her hip, but kept his own in his pockets.

They walked for a while, wandering, while Eudora told him about her cousin Nina, who was at school in DC studying something that sounded official and complicated. Eudora didn’t have any siblings, but she had more cousins than Diego could keep track of. Her family reunions, she said, were less like a party and more like a regional Nigerian-American Parcheesi convention. They had to rent a ballroom. As for why her family was so into Parcheesi, she couldn’t say.

“Like, it couldn’t have been poker?” she said, laughing. “I’m great at Parcheesi. I clean up at that game. But it’s absolutely useless. No one else has played it since 1975.”

They turned a corner onto a diagonal side street with a fire escape and a single young tree. Diego’s feet slowed, and Eudora looked back at him to make sure he was following. He took his right hand out of his pocket, ready to grab hers, to kiss her maybe, but before he could, a door a dozen yards ahead of them swung open, and a man emerged. His hair was translucently blond, but his face was ruddy, giving the impression that all the color in him had drained downward. Before the man pulled his hood over his head, Diego got a glimpse of a tattoo on the side of his neck, a solid black circle the size of a quarter. Instead of reaching for Eudora’s hand, Diego’s fingers closed around one of the knives holstered against his ribs.

“Hey, just wait here a second,” he murmured. The man disappeared around the corner, and Diego sped up to follow. Eudora called his name, but he ignored her.

By the time he circled back to that spot, his clothes damp and blood dripping into his eye from a cut on his eyebrow, there was no sign of Eudora. He checked his watch. Nearly midnight. He stood there for a minute in the dark, wiping blood on his sleeve and waiting half-heartedly for her to appear, like a kid lost at the mall. How had it taken so long? The one guy had led him to the other six, and he’d gotten most of them in the leg or the arm except for that one in the chest but he would live, probably – Diego was reasonably certain he’d never killed anyone, out on his own, almost 100% sure – and then there was the last guy, and Diego had ended up in the river, which couldn’t hurt him but he hated it anyway, that feeling like all his pores were opening up and he could at any moment cease to exist, no more border between the water inside or outside of him. He spit blood onto the sidewalk. He thought that Eudora was a bitch, but as soon as he did his mind supplied his mother’s disapproving look, a Pavlovian guilt response. Mom. God, fuck everybody else. He missed his mom.

It’d be fine. Dora just didn’t want to lose her job, getting mixed up in the work he did. She knew how important it was that they both did what they needed to do. Tonight hadn’t been a test. He hadn’t failed.

He walked home alone. His apartment was under a comic book store, though his landlord was threatening to evict him. The shipping warehouse wasn’t giving him as many hours as they used to. Things were tight, for right now.

Diego felt around in the dark for a lamp – the overhead was blown out, and he hadn’t replaced the bulb. He checked the fridge and found nothing but eggs and a supermarket cupcake someone from upstairs had given him five days ago when he’d walked by during a staff party. He went into the bathroom to wash the blood off his face. A rivulet of it swirled down the drain like an escaping worm. Next, he peeled off his clothes, which were drying stiff with mud, and stood naked in front of the mirror. He’d have a new scar. How many could he get before it wasn’t dashing anymore? Luther had never scarred, but every papercut Diego got seemed to, as if his body were eager to create a record, a running tally of failures.

The voicemail light on his phone was blinking. Diego practically dove for it, not even dressed yet, hoping it was Eudora and not his landlord.

“Master Diego.” It had been years, five or six years, since Diego had heard Pogo’s voice. It hadn’t changed. “Please call the house at your earliest convenience. Something has happened. I’m afraid it’s grievous news.” 

Diego froze. When Diego had given Pogo the number for this apartment, his exact words had been, “Pogo, just call me if somebody dies.” He’d been planning not to pass along his new number if he moved out of the area code. If Dad kicked it, he could hear about it on the news like everybody else.

Either Dad was dead, or Mom was, or Luther was injured, or maybe Klaus, Klaus’s luck had run out and he’d pumped himself full of fentanyl and Dad had found out about it first. Diego pulled on a pair of sweatpants, sent a quick prayer into the universe – Let it be Dad – and, stubbornly guiltless, dialed the phone.

The conversation lasted two minutes. Diego knew because he watched the second hand crawl around the clock until he set the receiver down on his bedside table and let the dial tone drone. He asked what had happened. He asked when. He said no, don’t fucking put Dad on. He apologized for swearing. He said somebody had to tell Allison. He said some other things, but his own voice sounded muffled, like he was underwater, and he couldn’t remember them later.

What was the last thing he had said to Luther? He couldn’t remember that, either. An anger gripped him that was almost euphoric, but there was nothing to do with it, so he sat, still as one of Mom’s paintings, not even breathing, until, in spite of himself, he slept.

For the first time in a long time, Diego dreamt of the day Ben died. Diego had sprinted across the pavement, willing the pile of flesh on the ground to straighten out and become his brother again before he reached it. The slippery dread of realizing it wouldn’t. In the dream, the stretch was impossibly long, Ben’s body impossibly mangled, but the look on Ben’s face was accurate to Diego’s memory: unsurprised, almost angry, almost laughing. Where was Luther? Behind him, Klaus was screaming, and Diego could hear Allison’s voice murmuring, “I heard a rumor that you aren’t in any pain,” and, as always, he wasn't sure if she was talking to Ben, or to everybody else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the comics, Diego can hold his breath indefinitely.


	3. Allison

Allison hated press tours. She didn’t mind flying, normally, but a press tour was a purgatory of traveling, one florescent airport after another, undrinkable coffee, and inevitable regret of one’s choice of shoes. Sometimes, the rhythm of it made her feel almost as if she were standing still, locations and faces lurching past her like TV channels when someone’s sat on the remote. In every interview, she was expected to be energetic and charming and touch Chris or Katja affectionately on the shoulder even if one of them had eaten the last of her pistachios without asking mere moments before. It wasn’t like she could rumor them into throwing it up. Or, technically she could, but that would be gross, and arguably evil, and it wouldn’t bring back her pistachios. Well, okay, technically it would, but, again: gross.

One last interview, and then she could go back to her hotel and sleep for fifteen hours before she had to get up and do it all over again. They’d come from the soupy Florida heat into air conditioning cranked to a setting that seemed to be designed to banish the very memory of warmth. Maybe they thought it was possible to retain some of the excess cold and bring it back outside with you, or maybe it was just the only way people around here had to express their rage at the humidity. The interviewer, who was – thank God –a woman this time, was wearing a cardigan that Allison kept eyeing like a child looking at a dessert before dinner. She must be used to having to prepare for a variety of microclimates, Allison thought. It looked cozy, a fuzzy blue wool with flower-shaped buttons. Allison missed central California, where it was so often the same temperature both inside and out, as if the whole world were one huge room.

“I heard a rumor,” Allison whispered as she and Chris and Katja sat down, because desperate times called for desperate measures. “I heard a rumor that I’m perfectly comfortable in this space.”

She didn’t usually rumor herself. It felt kind of illicit, like masturbating, and it didn’t always work. Still, suddenly the idea of minding the chill seemed far away, like a thought she’d had years ago before she understood something fundamental and obvious about temperature. Her back relaxed, her shoes stopped pinching, and the dinnerplate-sized light aimed at her seemed friendly rather than harsh. Wow, Allison thought. I am a hell of a drug.

Next to her, Allison could hear Katja’s teeth chattering, and she would have done it for her and Chris too, really she would have, but by then the camera was rolling. A person she rumored would forget that she had said anything, but if a camera caught it, it was like a magician’s trick exposed. The first time she saw a video of herself using her power, in a documentary that had aired when she was nineteen, it reminded her of a movie with the background music removed, all the romance gone. Just a naked voice, mean and thin.

Katja rallied and told a charming story about how annoying it was to take her alien costume on and off when she had to pee, with Chris diving in every once in a while to grab a punchline she’d set up. Chris and Katja had gone to Juliard together, and they had a genuine teasing rapport that Allison found comforting. They didn’t leave her out, but they didn’t expect her to entertain them either, and Allison could often let her mind drift to the background noise of their chatter, like falling asleep next to her brothers in the car. A film set, Allison had found, was a temporary family that went up like a circus tent, colorful and real until it was taken apart at a prearranged time, a dream-family. She wasn’t sure which part she admired more: the circus, or the elegance of its disassembly.

“There was one time that I was doing – there’s this stunt where I get thrown by an explosion,” Katja was saying.

“Which she insisted on doing herself,” Chris interjected.

“Yeah. Obviously, because I’m not a wimp like Chris.”

“I have a healthy sense of self-preservation, thank you very much.”

Allison and Katja rolled their eyes at each other, extra big for the camera.

“In one of the takes I got tangled in the wire somehow and flipped over and ended up hanging by my shoulder, totally stuck, and Allison, who wasn’t even in that scene – were you even filming that afternoon?”

Allison didn’t remember the day. “I don’t think so?”

“Well, Allison comes running, beats everybody there, beats the stunt team there. It was like you went it to mom mode. She’s going to be a great mom one day. You were like ‘Alright, everybody stay calm.’”

“That’s the superhero training kicking in,” added Chris.

Had she done that? She must have. Allison made a face she hoped conveyed being called out for something slightly embarrassing but harmless, like having been a Mouseketeer, or enjoying the Bachelor. “‘Everybody stay calm’ is about all I’ve retained, unfortunately.” Next to her, Katja laughed beautifully.

The interviewer mercifully changed the subject to ask if they had grown up with Star Trek. Chris said he’d preferred Star Wars as a kid; Katja used to watch Voyager.

There had been one television in the house Allison grew up in, in the East Wing lounge on the second floor. Originally, it was buried in a closet underneath a pile of – what else – umbrellas, but Klaus had discovered it during a game of sardines somewhere around the age of nine and dug it out with the glee of a pirate unearthing treasure. It had taken all seven of them, along with some clandestine help from Mom, to get it working. It was the size of a milk crate with cracked faux-wood panelling and rabbit ear antennae longer than any of them were tall that would droop steadily, eventually plunging the picture into static and eliciting a chorus of groans from the children piled up on the couch. It always seemed to happen right at the most exciting part of the show. (She’d mentioned this once, and Five had said that was “a fallacy,” which had prompted Klaus to tell him to shut up, oh my God.) How the antennae had been intended to stay upright, Allison had no idea, but their solution had been to take turns standing next to the TV and holding them up. Diego and Luther always argued about who had done it last. Sometimes, they had to resort to rock-paper-scissors.

Occasionally, Allison would rumor her way out of rabbit ear duty, but Vanya always seemed to know when she had done it, and her look would be one of such pure disappointment, nothing at all like Mom’s affectionate exasperation or even Dad’s constant undercurrent of disapproval, that Allison did take a turn more often than not. Her memory of Star Trek was of craning her neck to try and see what Counselor Troi was doing until everybody yelled at her for letting the picture go fuzzy. The theme song would float tinnily from the speakers, her arms would ache, and she would watch the light move across her siblings’ faces in the dark, a second, secret performance. Star Trek’s Platonic shadow: Vanya and Ben hiding their faces in each other’s sleeves when it got too scary, Five rambling about how the physics didn’t make sense until somebody kicked him, Diego asleep on Luther’s shoulder, and over all of them the light changing, and changing, and changing again, a message in a language she didn’t understand.

The interviewer turned expectantly to Allison.

“Can I tell you guys something?” Allison said. “I had never seen it before I got cast.”

Everybody laughed.

On their way back to the hotel, somebody from the PR team – Craig? Another Chris? – fell into step with her.

“Just so you know, your father is trying to get in touch with you. His… assistant? Called your agent and left a number early this morning.”

Allison frowned. Did Pogo think she would forget the number for the house? Or had it changed? If Dad was calling her, it meant he’d probably uncovered some new menace to the Future of the World, or thought he had, so maybe he’d changed the number out of paranoia, as if the shadows that hunted him were liable to take him out with a telephone call.

“Thanks, Chr – thanks,” she said. She’d call Dad tomorrow – or maybe she wouldn’t. He could wait. She wasn’t going to hop to anymore, not for him or for anyone. Whatever it was, Luther would handle it, or maybe the goddamn government like they were supposed to, and she could hear all about it later, when this movie had premiered and she was lying in a hammock with a glass of red wine outside her house on the bay.

Funny, though, that he should try to call her on a day when she had been thinking so much about Vanya and the boys. Once she had politely declined Katja’s offer for drinks at the hotel bar and shut herself into her room, she peeled off her heels and unfolded Luther’s latest letter.

On Dad’s monogrammed stationery, Luther’s large printing looked childish, and every once in a while a line would nosedive toward the bottom of the page and then right itself, making a dip he’d had to accommodate for by spacing out words underneath. He’d had difficulty developing - what was the phrase Mom had used? - fine motor skills, never quite able to gauge how much force to apply to a task. When they were little, he couldn’t hold a pencil without snapping it in two. One of Allison’s earliest memories was of him poking her so hard on the arm – blue punch buggy no punch backs! – that a bruise took root, a little purple confusion that bloomed over her elbow. They’d both cried so much that Mom had to gather them up in her lap and sing “Little Boy Blue.” To apologize, he’d brought her something from the yard… a dandelion? A smooth stone? Dad had gotten him into model airplanes as a “training exercise” to correct the problem, and it had, mostly, but Luther still wrote too broadly and sometimes askew.

_Dear Allison,_

_I hope this letter reaches you before you leave for the Star Trek tour, but if it doesn’t, I hope that it went well/wasn’t too painful. Good for you for dumping Darren. Not to get too brotherly, but he sounded like a jerk._

_Dad is well, working hard as always. He misses everybody. Pogo has hatched a plan to repair the greenhouse, so it’s sure to be chaos around here this fall. But hey, we might have fresh tomatoes again!I’m training a lot, and my missions are 3-for-3 zero-casualty since January. A school out in Redton is going to name a building after me because of that thing with the bus._

_Here’s a wild thought: maybe this year, for our birthday, I could come and visit you. Not if you’re busy, of course. Let me know if you think it’s a good idea, and I’ll clear it with Dad._

_Sincerely,_

_Luther_

Allison tore a piece off of the pad of paper provided by the hotel – SHERATON, it said on the top in raised blue letters, like a cheap echo of Dad’s elegant monogram – and wrote out her response with the pen she found next to it, which said SHERATON too, in case you forgot where you were at any point during the writing process.

_Dear Luther,_

_I wanted to wait to reply until I had something exciting to report, which is: I’m writing to you from Miami! It’s beautiful here, but very hot. The tour has been great, not painful at all. Well, maybe a smidge. It helps that I’m genuinely very excited about this movie. And the cast is great. We’ve gotten really close._

_I saw that mission on the news. You were amazing, and I was the only person in the room who could point to the TV and say “That’s my brother.”_

_I think you coming to visit me for our birthday is a great idea! I do miss sharing my birthday. I’d love to show you California. Here’s a wild thought, though: what it you just tell Dad that you’re going instead of asking him? You don’t need his permission._

_Love,_

_Allison_

Allison chewed on the Sheraton pen. She crumpled the letter, uncrumpled it, copied it onto a new sheet of paper, crumpled that, and finally wrote it out a third time without the last two sentences. The phone rang, but she ignored it. She ran a bath.

In the morning, Allison woke before her alarm and, without getting out of bed, added the sentences she’d removed back in as a postscript. She folded the letter neatly and tucked it into her purse.

Then she turned on the news.


	4. Vanya

“And why do you think that is?”

Vanya looked up from her coiled hands and over Denise’s shoulder at the clock. Why did it tick so loudly? She’d never heard a clock tick as loudly as the one in Denise’s office. The sound resonated like a wind-up metronome counting out the tempo to a song nobody was playing. The second movement of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor would work at this speed. Her fingers itched for her violin. She hadn’t brought it; she never did, unless she was going straight to rehearsal after her session, but sometimes she wished she did so she could just hold it while she talked. Run her hands over the curves of its body. Denise would probably consider that an issue. 

“Vanya?”

Vanya coughed. “Um. I don’t know, really. I guess I just never thought I had much to contribute.”

“You’re a competent enough violinist to play professionally. Why shouldn’t you teach?”

“I only play professionally part-time.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. I guess you’re right. Sorry.”

Denise smiled at her. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“Right.”

They stared at each other. The metronome in Vanya’s head swung back and forth.

“I thought more about what you said, about how maybe I should try writing about my childhood,” Vanya said. “I wrote a couple of pages.”

“And how did that feel?”

She’d written about the house, the layout of each room as she remembered it: the foyer with its chandelier, the library, the low-ceilinged kitchen where Vanya and Mom and Pogo would play dummy whist when nobody else was home, Dad’s forbidden study. Her bare little room: walls of whitewashed brick and a bed with a metal frame. The gallery where Mom would sit all night like a ghost. Vanya used to spend hours wandering the halls by herself, and she knew places in that house that no one else did. There was the attic space where Allison and Luther had their secret fort that they thought no one could find, but Vanya had. She knew about the disused root cellar under the greenhouse, the second laundry room, and the closet in one of the empty upstairs bedrooms full of old dresses (whose?), which concealed a staircase that took you back down to the ground floor. Hide-and-seek was the only game she ever won as a kid.

“It made me feel detached from all of it. Like a scientist,” Vanya said.

“That can sometimes be helpful. To take a step back.”

Vanya nodded. She glanced back up at the clock. The session was nearly over. Vanya, on some weird childish instinct, willed the second hand to stop ticking, but of course it kept going, thundering on and on toward the end.

Vanya got to the record store three minutes early and waved to Lucia on her way to dump her things in the break room. Lucia glanced up from the Vogue she was paging through and waggled her fingers. Her red nail polish glinted like five little warnings.

“Your sister’s in this magazine,” Lucia said, tonguing her lollipop from one side of her mouth to the other.

“She’s in every magazine,” Vanya replied. She jiggled her key around in the lock to the STAFF ONLY door. It had a tendency to decline to function just when you really needed to get in. When she’d first started working here, she’d made the mistake of saying, “Oh, my sister’s in that movie” about some romcom of Allison’s Lucia was thinking about seeing, and now Lucia was convinced Vanya could introduce her.

Lucia leaned over the counter.

“You need to pull the handle up before you turn it,” she groaned, half-lying on the glass. Then she narrowed her eyes. “You’re fucking with me, right? She’s not really your sister.”

Vanya pulled up on the handle, and the deadbolt receded with a thunk.

“She’s straight anyway, Lucia.”

Lucia made a face. She started to say something else, but Vanya closed the door on her. The break room smelled of curry recently reheated in the microwave, as well as an older, sour smell Vanya had long been convinced was some animal living – or maybe dead – in the walls. At some point since Tuesday, someone had cut out a picture from a magazine of a smiling man in a turtleneck with a speech bubble reading “Have fun at the spa!”, crossed out “fun” and replaced it with “diarrhea”, and taped it to the bathroom door. There was also a note next to the sink: IF YOU USE THE LAST FORK AND DON’T WASH IT RIGHT AFTER YOU’RE WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICA. Sure enough, Vanya found a single fork sticking up at an angle in the drying rack with no brethren in sight, like a tree in the desert. She felt oddly bad for it, and she shifted it so it was standing straighter.

Somewhere in the building, an air conditioner was rattling, a sound that made Vanya feel like she’d been pushed into a pool of crumpled tin foil. She sat down on the couch (it was a futon, which raised questions: who had ever slept here?) and shook two of her pills out of the bottle. She used to have to take them with water, but sometime in her teen years she’d figured out how to dry swallow. The sound softened.

“Please don’t remind me of the existence of heterosexuals at this counter,” Lucia announced when Vanya reemerged from the break room. “This is supposed to be my safe space.”

Vanya laughed. “I’m straight.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever.”

Lucia’s manicured eyebrows shot up.

“What?” said Vanya.

“Nothing. Whatever you say.”

“I am.”

“Uh-huh.”

Lucia went back to Vogue. Vanya flipped through the pile of records to reshelve. Somebody had apparently carried Queen’s entire discography around the store and then bought none of it.

“What happened to all our other forks, anyway?” Vanya asked, to avoid looking over Lucia’s shoulder at the magazine, where there was a photograph of Allison on a horse, for some reason. She’d bleached part of her hair. It looked nice.

“What?” Lucia said. “Oh, the forks. God knows. I think Jeff steals them.”

The bell rang, and two men entered the shop, one Vanya knew and one she didn’t. Benjamin came in a couple of afternoons a week, usually with a friend or two in tow, mostly because he wanted to fuck Lucia and seemed to think that if he wore tight enough jeans in her general vicinity it might wake her up to the appeal of the male form like a cartoon bonk to the head. He had flaky skin and a Raspuntina t-shirt Vanya was jealous of. His friend was short, relatively speaking, although when they came up to the counter it became clear that he still had a good three or four inches on Vanya. He was what boys’ clothing sizing referred to as “husky.” Vanya had never understood what being slightly doughy had to do with sled dogs. Her siblings had all been scrawny kids, even Luther. Fast metabolisms. It was one of those things that had made them feel related even if they didn’t look alike: the same knobby knees peeking out over the same gray socks.

“Hey, Lucia,” Benjamin said. He didn’t know Vanya’s name, or if he did, he’d never said it.

“Hi, Benjamin,” Lucia replied, not looking up from her magazine.

“What are you reading?”

Lucia glanced up and then down again. “I’m looking at pictures of Vanya’s hot sister.”

Vanya put a A Night at the Opera back on the stack.

“Let’s make a deal,” she said. “I won’t mention straight people if you don’t talk about how hot my sister is.”

Benjamin snorted. “Who’s your friend?”

Vanya didn’t bother reminding Benjamin that they’d had a conversation about Rasputina a week before, and one about Pile the week before that, or that she and Lucia weren’t even really friends.

“This is Vanya,” Lucia sighed into a photo of Allison on the beach. “She’s straight, allegedly.”

“Lucia,” Vanya complained.

“That’s alright,” said Benjamin’s friend. He held up his open palms as it diffusing a threat. “We won’t hold it against you.” He was smiling at her. A little mop of his locs the length of her index finger fell over his eyebrow.

Vanya picked up the pile of reshelves and started returning records to their homes, while Benjamin made a show of rifling through the discount cassettes on the counter next to Lucia. Maybe Vanya would write a book about her life, and then these people would know… something. She hadn’t quite worked out what. She could feel Benjamin’s friend’s eyes following her as she slid Bread in front of the Beatles, the ghost of a smile on his handsome face. If she’d had a superpower, she would have wanted it to be invisibility. Then she could be neither ignored nor mocked. Benjamin put his elbows on the counter and shifted his weight from knee to knee. His shrink-wrapped ass bobbed at her like a taunt.

She ran out of reshelves but continued wandering around the store. She pocketed stray wrappers to throw out later and straightened things that didn’t strictly need to be straightened, both listening and not listening to the conversation.

“Did you hear about Spaceboy?” Benjamin asked Lucia.

The name “Spaceboy” had been invented when Luther was fourteen and the teen magazines were desperate to find a way to frame his interest in model rockets as something other than unbearably nerdy. He’d maintained for a while that he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, even going so far as to research NASA eligibility requirements and paste up newspaper cutouts of the ISS in his bedroom, but one day, Vanya couldn’t quite recall when, he’d dropped the idea abruptly and entirely. The name had stuck, though. Sooner or later, it would have to be retired, Vanya thought. He was already nearly twenty-three.

“...didn’t know?” Benjamin was saying.

“No, I rolled out of bed at noon and came straight here,” Lucia replied. The records made a lovely little clacking noise when you flipped through them, Vanya thought.

“It’s the end of an era, man,” Benjamin said.

“What’s the end of an era?” Vanya asked, but all of them, including Benjamin’s friend, had lost interest in Vanya. They were clustered together at the counter as if sharing a secret.

“Sorry,” she tried again. “What happened with — with Spaceboy? Did he quit?”

She could barely picture Luther wearing jeans, let alone applying for a job or living in an apartment. Where would he go? And what would Dad do, alone in that house with the disused root cellar and the abandoned dresses?

“Hey, Vanya, Allison Hargreeves isn’t really your related to you, right? You were pranking me,” Lucia said.

Benjamin’s friend gave her a questioning look.

“Vanya’s last name is Hargreeves, and she told me that—“

Vanya felt a sudden surge of vindictiveness.

“You got me,” she said. “I was just messing with you. She’s not my sister.”

The look on Lucia’s face was one of real relief. “Good. Because her brother died.”

“I – Ben’s been dead for years.” It would be six years this November.

“No. Luther Hargreeves. Last night,” Benjamin explained, slowly, as if she were a child. The name sounded absurd, out of context, two mismatched syllables coming out of a mouth they weren’t meant to: Loo-ther. For a full second, they were all looking at her: Lucia, Benjamin, and Benjamin’s friend, whose name Vanya still hadn’t caught. Vanya laughed, just a little. Then, when she said nothing, they all turned back to their conversation, and Vanya’s delayed, hoarse “What?” was lost under the chatter.

“I saw him once, in 2005, after the earthquake. He lifted an entire car – ”

“ – I was always into Diego, personally, ‘cause I really wanted to be edgy at thirteen – ”

“ – It’s just so sad, you know, people like that lead such sad lives in the end – ”

“ – My parents never let me read anything about it because they’re the kind of Christians that thought it was an affront to God – ”

“ – Everybody knows that if you were really an edgy kid you would have been into Klaus or Ben – ”

Vanya wanted to argue, to tell them that Luther could survive getting hit by a truck, that she’d seen him get hit by a truck and not even scar.

“I have to make a phone call,” Vanya said, but no one heard her. Looking at them, she felt as if she were looking at a tableau behind glass. 

She picked up the store phone and dialed the last number she knew for home. It would ring in Pogo’s office, a black rotary dialer in the corner of his meticulous desk. She wondered if the room had changed, if the straight-backed chair she remembered climbing on as a child had finally been replaced by a rolling office one, because of his back. He probably still had the framed photo of the kids on their thirteenth birthday, one of the last photos of all seven of them together. It wasn’t the official photo Dad kept in his study. Dad hadn’t let Vanya be a part of that one. In Pogo’s photo, however, she and Ben had their arms around each other, while Five propped his elbow casually on Ben’s shoulder to show off his recent growth spurt. Dad insisted on lining them up in order for photographs, and so Luther was always the furthest person away from Vanya, a hint of blond hair sticking out over Diego’s head like a weird halo.

Clutching the receiver to her ear, she found herself thinking: _I take it back. I take it back. I take it back_ , as if by claiming that Allison was not her sister she had severed some vital string that had snapped backwards and caused Luther to be dead. _I take it back. I’m sorry._ She repeated it like a mantra, and the phone rang. It rang and rang and rang.


	5. Klaus

There was a body in the bathtub. It was naked and pruned, head still above water for now but sinking steadily. One foot, shiny with blood, was hooked around the edge of the tub – evidence, maybe, of one last attempt to stand – and a red staccato of handprints interrupted the pattern of blue fish on the shower curtain, like abstract art. There was blood on the floor too, a still-wet rust-colored slick of it that at a certain point resolved into the tread of somebody’s shoe. The body itself was so white it was almost as if the tub had grown eyes, and that was worse than the blood, to see the eyes and the porcelain nose and the thin blue worm of a mouth desperately try to add up to a face and fail. Klaus thought of the movie Psycho. Then he thought: is it weird if I still pee?

A soap bubble floated lazily toward the open eye of the thing that had, up until very recently, Klaus assumed, been a man. Not that it was a good idea to go around assuming things like people’s genders or their exact times of death. Despite appearances, he was an expert on neither.

He closed his eyes. Opened them. One of the body’s eyes was under the water now, and the other appeared to be looking at him, a white marble with its cats-eye trained on him from an impossible distance.

God, whatever. He’d piss on the street. Get himself arrested for indecent exposure again. Would that make you happy, Mr. Ghost? The single eye continued watching him, the world’s most unfair staring contest.

Klaus flipped it the bird, then turned and left the bathroom, only stumbling a little. What a headache he had. Like something had died in his eardrum and the stink of its rot was spreading into the little hollows underneath his eyes. Like a tiny but complete cast of Les Mis was singing “One Day More” on his brain stem, but, like, on an off night, with the third best Gavroche — where the hell was he?

He’d emerged into an open floor plan apartment. The sharp line of a carpet divided the living room from a stupidly large expanse of hardwood floor that eventually hit a bump and became kitchen tile. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a soaring view of the sunrise winking over the rooftops that only served to make Klaus’s nausea worse. Abandoned champagne flutes and bottles of beer dotted the room like a fuzz of mold. One had broken; a spray of glass reached from one end of the kitchen to the other, ruining the regular black sheen of the tile with its impressionistic mishmash.

There were bodies, too, five or six of them, these ones sleeping. A woman in a Mickey Mouse crop top and lace underwear the color of mint candy was splayed out on the couch, and Klaus could see her chest pumping up and down like a bellows. It must have been a hell of a party. Pity he couldn’t remember a second of it.

He picked his way over a sticky patch on the floor and the passed-out form of somebody who seemed more glitter than person. There were only a few kitchen cabinets he could get at without stepping in the glass. He opened all of them. Empty. Empty. Gluten-free rolled oats. Ugh. He looked behind him; Mickey Mouse girl’s head and torso rose up over the back of the couch like Dracula from a coffin, only with more bedhead, and she blinked several times, as if hoping to replace the room with one she liked better.

“Psst. Hi. Hey,” Klaus said. “Do you know where I could find a little hair of the dog?”

She scowled at him and disappeared into the bathroom. Klaus dug around in his pockets and found half a Pop-Tart, a rubber band, and a beautiful, beautiful little white Vicodin. He was picking lint off the pill when he heard the scream, and it occurred to him for the first time that maybe what he’d seen hadn’t been a ghost at all.

The ensuing scramble to get out of the building was comical, a bunch of chicken-legged bastards in yesterday’s eyeliner racing down the stairwell like rats smoked out of a hole. Someone had called 911 — they weren’t animals — but nobody wanted to be there when the cops arrived. They reached the door as a unit and then scattered. Klaus ran three blocks down and jumped a fence to cut through the park. He had to put distance between himself and that neighborhood, which was too swanky, he stuck out, not to mention the body and its bottomless eye, and he felt a strange joy in the running. The wind sang by him, and the dewy grass felt good on his feet, which were, he realized with bemusement, bare.

The park spit him out on a street he didn’t know. He slowed to a walk and vomited into the nearest trash can. His hangover had moved past headache and become a sort of full-body roar, as if the wind that had seemed so pleasant a moment ago had gotten inside him and was now knocking around trying to get out. A fat lady in a beret saw him and crossed the street.

“I’m usually a lot more shoe-having than this,” he more muttered than called after her. Her beret bobbed out of sight around the corner like a little lantern. Klaus wiped his mouth on his sleeve and reached into his pocket for the Vicodin.

“Klaus,” said a voice, and Klaus looked up to find himself face-to-face with the body from the bathtub. This time, Klaus was certain he was a ghost, because he was standing up, watching Klaus with two unclouded eyes. He was still clothed only in his own blood, and in the frozen second that followed a fresh spurt dribbled out of a wound over his left nipple. Klaus wretched again. Then he ducked behind the trash can and covered his ears. 

“Klaus,” the dead man repeated. Klaus had never understood how dead people always knew his name. Was it part of orientation in the afterlife? Here are your sins itemized, your chains to rattle, oh, and also, this is Klaus? His father had said more than once that it was unclear whether ghosts existed all the time, everywhere, and Klaus was simply the only person who could see them, or if Klaus somehow caused them to exist, assembling them out of the world’s memory or pulling them from some great beyond like a hellish magnet. He wasn’t sure which was worse. No wonder so many of them just screamed at him.

Klaus popped the pill in his mouth, tucked his chin to his chest, and dry swallowed. One pill was better than nothing.

“Klaus,” said the dead man a third time, his voice quiet and pained. Klaus braced himself and walked through the fucker. Most people would expect walking through a ghost to feel cold and wet, like passing through a cloud, but it didn’t. It felt like nothing at all. What Klaus hated was the irrational fear, no matter how many times he did it, that this would be the time a ghost would suddenly figure out how to become solid. Its fingers would close around his throat, and he would struggle to free himself but be unable to wrench away and the grip would get tighter and tighter, and he would yell for help but no one would be able to tell what was wrong because to anyone else he would appear to be a man fighting the air, or his own shadow. When he was a kid, he used to have nightmares about that. He’d dream he was sitting at the dinner table and a dead person would begin hitting him or strangling him or stabbing him with a fork while his family continued eating as if nothing was happening. If he screamed, his father would bark, _No talking during mealtimes, Number Four_ without looking up from his newspaper, and his sisters would laugh at him over their mashed potatoes while the ghost tore out his heart, until he woke up sweating and tangled in his sheets.

Klaus walked through the bathtub man without incident, except a surprisingly indignant “Hey!” on the part of the ghost. He picked a direction and walked. When he’d been small, his mom had always come to his rescue after a bad dream with a glass of warm milk. After the crypt, though, Dad had forbidden her to help him. He needed to become Master of His Own Life or some other Dad bullshit. But he still woke everybody up with his screaming. Diego, whose room was next to his, used to tap out messages in Morse code on the wall: R U O K ? F U C K D A D. They expressed that sentiment with taps on a wall long before they had the courage to say it out loud.

“I think I’m dead!” yelled the bathtub man, somewhere behind him.

Klaus glanced back at him. God, he hoped he wouldn’t die naked; it was really, really difficult not to look at this guy’s undead dick.

“Yeah, no shit. Now go away to – wherever it is that you go. Please.”

“I was _murdered_!”

“Sorry, man. Tough break.”

Klaus kept walking, taking turns arbitrarily and longing for a cigarette. A cigarette, a hot cup of coffee, and a pile of prescription painkillers. The good stuff. Oxy. Wait, that looked familiar. He changed direction and crossed the street. There was that new donut place, Griddy’s, which meant he wasn’t far from Maude’s apartment. She’d be home. This was good news for many reasons, chief among them being that he still needed to fucking pee.

Meanwhile, the dead guy couldn’t take a hint. He waddled after Klaus, sometimes passing through people or walls to keep up. Because he cast no reflection and his footsteps made no sound, Klaus would periodically forget he was there, but then he’d glance behind him and the ghost would be huffing and puffing ten steps behind, apparently not having realized that he no longer needed to breathe. It was a confusing image, this gruesome figure trailing after him like a duckling, neither of them quite willing or able to muster up the energy to run. They’d invented a new genre, Klaus thought: the power walk chase scene.

“First of all,” said the ghost. “First of all, we hooked up last night, so I don’t appreciate--”

“Wait, what?” Klaus stopped, and the ghost walked through him, unable to control his own momentum.

“What this before or after you were stabbed to death in the bathroom?” Klaus said, in a voice much more high-pitched than he’d intended.

The ghost’s drained features rearranged themselves into something that resembled a disgusted face. “Before. I was having a pretty good night, actually, before the…” He mimed stabbing.

Klaus put his face in his hands. “You’re terrible at haunting. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“I only died, like, six hours ago!”

Klaus squinted at him, trying to discern what he would look like un-corpsified. It was no use. He was looking less scary, at least, although that might be the Vicodin kicking in. Klaus could feel its blanket wrapping around him; his headache was gone, and his feet, which had been burning from walking on the pavement barefoot, seemed not to be touching the ground at all.

“How did nobody notice you getting stabby-stabbed anyway?” Klaus asked. The borders between the ghost and the rest of the world were getting softer, the color of his blood duller. “Everybody in the place couldn’t have been that high.” This was a nicer color, Klaus thought. For the blood.

“That’s the thing,” the ghost said. “He was invisible.”

Klaus giggled.

“I’m serious,” argued the ghost. “And he muffled the sound somehow. It was like we were in a bubble–”

“I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t believe that, wouldn’t I? Wow. Invisible. That is classic. Wonder when his birthday is.”

Something was still bothering Klaus about this whole thing, besides the general concept of the thing itself, which bothered him on principle. It knocked around distantly in his mind.

“Listen, I have a sister. Her name is Noor Khimani. She lives in–” said the ghost, but he was flickering now, blurring at intervals like a bad TV connection. “You – you have to – ”

“Oh!” Klaus slapped himself on the forehead. “Why were you taking a bath at a party in the first place?”

But the dead man flickered one last time and vanished, leaving Klaus alone on the street corner. Or nearly so: a straight couple coming out of a breakfast place pointedly avoided eye contact with him as they waited for the walk signal. He, very graciously in his opinion, resisted making a lewd gesture at them. That was what had gotten him arrested back in April, which was the time Greg had ended up bailing him out even though they’d just broken up and hell if he was doing that again. He glanced one last time at the place Noor’s brother had been, wished the damp fucker good luck, and continued on to Maude’s. 

Maude was an aging hippie who lived over a garden shop because, she said, the plants gave her apartment extra oxygen. She’d let you stay for a week or so at a time as long as you were quiet coming up and down the stairs and didn’t steal anything too large. Klaus had no idea what she did for a living; she was retired from some kind of engineering, but now her chief activities seemed to be reading Tarot cards and acquiring an ever-increasing amount of succulents and wraparound skirts. He had stolen a skirt or two, but she’d said they looked better on him anyway, and it wasn’t like she kept inventory. Maude was comfortable with all kinds of things coming and going from her life: skirts, toothbrushes, cash, people.

Klaus sailed up the stairs and knocked on her narrow door.

“Oh Ma-aude,” he sang.

He heard her shuffling around inside. When she opened the door, Klaus could just glimpse the cuffs of her jeans peeking out from under a pink silk bathrobe that came down nearly to the floor. It probably hadn’t been intended to; Maude was a tiny woman, five feet or even less, and brittle as a dried flower. She reminded Klaus of an age-accelerated version of Vanya, although he couldn’t picture Vanya in a silk bathrobe of any color. He’d always thought that Vanya might have grown up to be an eccentric, if she’d been a little less cowed, but he’d pictured her as more of a butch Erik Satie.

“Klaus,” Maude said, smiling. “I didn’t think you existed before noon.”

“Neither did I, but here I am. I’ve brought you… half a Pop-Tart.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

Somebody Klaus vaguely knew was asleep on Maude’s couch. Becky? Bonnie? Bubble? Klaus rushed past them to the bathroom, which was a little grungy but body-free, and finally pissed. The apartment smelled of coffee and lavender and the morning air drifting in through an open window. He opened the cabinet under the sink and fished his bag out from behind the toilet paper (you couldn’t be too careful, even at Maude’s). He took two more pills and sat on the floor with his back against the tub. The events of the morning already seemed far away, like a dream after a cup of warm milk. He watched the light changing on the blue tile as a tree outside moved in the wind.

There was a knock on the door, and for a half a second Klaus thought it was Diego, tapping out a message on the wall, but it was only Maude.

“You want coffee?” Maude asked.

“Does that qualify as mixing uppers and downers?”

He drifted out of the bathroom to the kitchen, where Maude was spooning instant coffee into a mug. She had beautiful hands, covered in valleys and shadows like a topographic map. A secret: he absolutely would have slept with her if she’d asked, à la _Harold and_. She didn’t, though, because she had standards, or it didn’t occur to her, or she thought he was gay, which was reasonable considering all the men he went to bed with.

There was a squat little combo TV-radio tucked between the toaster and the sink, and Maude had it tuned to NPR. Meghna Chakrabarti was saying something about recycling.

Maude shut off the radio so she could unplug it and plug in the toaster.

“It’s annoying. I wish I had more outlets,” she explained as she inserted two slices of white bread. 

Klaus shrugged. “I’m sure Meghna understands. Anyway, when I was a kid, we had to physically hold up the rabbit ears on our shitty TV to get any signal at all, uphill both ways, and we liked it, so no complaining, whippersnapper.”

Maude cocked an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t you grow up with a lot of money?”

“Yep. Richer than God. My dad just didn’t believe in television. He thought it would give us square eyeballs or something.”

Maude put her craggy hands on either side of his face in a maternal sort of gesture – yeah, he could rule out ever getting with her.

“You seem like you had a rough night,” she said. “Let me do a reading for you.”

“Sure.” Klaus only ever let Maude do Tarot readings for him when he was extremely high, which he was going to be in 20-25 minutes. They sat at the kitchen table, and Maude shuffled her deck, which was characteristically flower themed. Klaus tucked his feet under his knees and closed his eyes. The cards whispered against each other in Maude’s hands. From the next room, Klaus could hear Becky-Bonnie-Bubble snoring, and it was pleasant, an audible assurance that they weren’t alone.

Maude clicked her tongue. “Every time with you, the first card I draw is Death. That means you’re always changing.”

Klaus hummed in response. Next, she drew the Four of Wands and the inverted Ten of Cups, which she said was a weird combination, but Klaus wasn’t really listening to the meanings. He felt good, like he’d felt when he was running through the park, as if where he’d come from and where he was going didn’t matter, weren’t even real, and all there was to exist in was an infinite present, a universe expanding outward from his spleen.

The toaster dinged. Maude got up, unplugged it, plugged the radio back in, and opened up the fridge.

“Luther Hargreeves, the ‘super hero’ sometimes known as Spaceboy, is dead,” a different voice, not Meghna Chakrabarti, was saying, and Klaus’s first reaction was annoyance at it for poking through his good feeling, and also for pronouncing “superhero” as if it were two words. There was a certain kind of person who said it every single time as if it were the first time they’d ever encountered the concept, out of a sort of stubborn disdain that, after all these years, still made Klaus want to find a face to spit in.

The voice kept talking. There weren’t a lot of details yet, it said, about what he had been doing, but the family had confirmed it early this morning. “The family” meant Dad and Pogo, and sort of Mom, Klaus guessed, and Luther, of course. He pictured Luther in his old bedroom, too big for his twin bed, putting on a record and starting another set of pushups, his nose coming down to kiss the dusty hardwood and then up again, forever.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Maude asked, and Klaus realized that he was laughing, uncontrollably. He watched himself from a great distance as his head came down onto the table and disturbed Maude’s cards, as he hiccuped and coughed, as tears ran from his eyes.


	6. Grace

The house had to be made ready for the children to come home. Grace dusted in the library and scoured the kitchen with lye. She arranged Luther’s records in alphabetical order the way he liked them. She raked around Ben’s statue and burned the leaves. Where was Luther? Luther was not here. Diego was not here. Luther was not here, but not in the same way Diego was not here. Yesterday, Luther had been here, riding a bicycle. Today he was boiling out of his uniform. Today he was dust. Grace stopped to check her hair in the mirror.

Grace swept the staircase and fixed Mr. Hargreeves a lunch, fruit salad and cold cuts. She left it on a tray outside his study. His study was locked. Mr. Hargreeves was working. Grace arranged Luther’s records in alphabetical order within subcategories of genre, the way he liked them. Grace put new sheets on the beds in the children’s rooms. Grace went upstairs and tried on one of the dresses in the closet of the Rose Bedroom. It was too long for her even in her heels, and when she tried to walk, her foot caught on the hem and she fell hard onto the floor. A mistake. Silly me. She checked for damage: nothing serious. Klaus had fallen once, wearing her shoes. He’d broken his jaw, poor baby. He’d had bad dreams. Children dreamed. She dreamed too, sometimes, of rolling green hills in summer, a gentle wind and not a house in sight, just the sky, infinite and blue. He’d had to grow up, in the end. Mr. Hargreeves had said that high heels were not for little boys, boys of any size, and he was right, of course, always.

Pogo referred to all the unused bedrooms as “guest bedrooms,” although there were never any guests, which Grace thought was funny. The Rose Bedroom had a beautiful bed, with a carved headboard and a deep burgundy duvet whose ends had been tucked under the mattress with military precision by someone who predated her. Grace sat on the bed and stroked the cloth with her fingers. It was so quiet in the house today. She lay down. The stiff sheets crunched underneath her. She pretended to sleep. She pretended to die.

Grace hung up the strange dress and changed back into her own, yellow with green flowers. She went back downstairs and collected the untouched tray from outside Mr. Hargreeves’s study. After she’d dealt with it, she dusted in the drawing room and the front hall, straightened all the portraits of the children, and vacuumed the downstairs lounge. She passed Pogo in the hallway; he seemed sick, or sad, more stooped than usual. She’d ask him later if he wanted soup. Luther was on a mission — no, he’d come back last night, come back and died, which was to be not here not in the way Diego was not here.

She checked her hair in the mirror. Yesterday, Luther had been riding a bicycle. She’d taught him to ride a bicycle, though she couldn’t remember ever having ridden one herself. How funny. Her hair in the mirror: yellow, with an impeccable wave.

She went into Luther’s bedroom and arranged his records by year the way he liked them. She made his bed. Military precision. She made his bed. The sunlight moved across the floor.

Mr. Hargreeves came to find her in the evening, his face a mask of displeasure. He stopped just short of entering Luther’s room. His feet rolled a little on the door sill.

“Grace, I’ve been calling for you,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. I was making the bed.”

His skin tightened around his monocle. “You haven’t made the children’s beds since they were small.”

He looked around at the room, so Grace did too: the wooden airplanes hanging from the ceiling, the stack of dumbbells in the corner, an unfinished book spine up and open on the bedside table. Grace closed the book and set it down, but it had been lying open too long and the cover sprang out again. She’d always told the children not to be so careless with books. It was Ben’s book, she realized, one of those Harry Potters that he’d loved so much.

She had a sense that there was something she was supposed to do in this moment with her body, but her body did not do it, and so she sat with her ankles crossed underneath her and her hand on the book to hold it closed. Luther: his hands turning the pages of Ben’s book. Ben: not here. Allison: on the television. Luther: uniform peeling off, skin peeling off underneath it, layer after layer, blood and flesh all the way down to nothing. Where was Luther, in all of that? Grace looked at her own unmoving hand, and it seemed separate from her, like any other object in the house.

“Grace, come here,” Mr. Hargreeves said.

Grace did. Mr. Hargreeves led her down the hall and out of the east wing, to his study. He told her to sit in the chair by the fireplace. He opened the panel in the back of her neck with a screwdriver - cold - and tugged at one of her internal wires. He plugged something in, which beeped.

Luther was riding a bicycle, age ten. Luther was insisting they finish Monopoly, even though all the other children were sick of playing. Luther was proud of being the tallest. Luther was putting toothpaste on his pimples. Luther was a tattletale. Luther was a real superhero. Luther was riding a bicycle. Luther was. Riding. Luther was was riding a bicycle.

Something closed around the memory, unmoored it and pulled it gently out of its place in her mind. Luther. Was. He was. Bicycle. Getting further and further away. Bicycle.

Bicycle Bicycle Bicycle Bicycle Who wants to be a little helper and clear away the dishes? Ben is. Bicycle. Still in your heart. Silly me. Riding a bicycle. The sun was shining. Smile, everyone. Remember, be nice be nice to your sister. A boy, whose name was Luther, was riding a bicycle. Fourth of July. The countryside in summer. A boy on a bicycle. Remember, smoke from the leaves, a black plume of it, how it rose into the air but dissipated before it hit the sky.


	7. Allison

Allison cried her way through the majority of both the plane ride and the taxi from the airport. Sometimes, they were angry tears, at Dad or Luther or herself, but mostly the crying was just a thing that was happening, like rain. She wore the biggest sunglasses she owned and made sure that anyone who recognized her forgot. Klaus had always teased her about being an ugly crier. He cried beautifully, or at least he had when he was a kid, while she was a sniffler. Her whole face got involved. It was something directors were always trying to fix.

The house came into view too soon, and she had the driver circle the block a few times while she blew her nose into a napkin from an airport cafe and redid her makeup, then twice more when she saw the door and felt a little sick. The last time she’d travelled this route had been to film The Brave; she hadn’t seen any of her family then, although they had probably known she was there. This was the opposite direction of home now, a separate coast with foreign trees and weather. She’d almost convinced herself that the whole city had ceased to exist when she left it, a mythical place locked away in her childhood. But here were the early-falling leaves, blowing along the sidewalk outside the wrought iron gate of her father’s house, just like they always had. The umbrellas on the doors looked like eyes.

“You gonna get out or what?” The taxi driver looked at her in the rearview mirror.

“Sorry. You have a nice day.”

The taxi was already disappearing around the corner when Allison realized she’d left her sunglasses on the seat. They were expensive, Bulgari, with a pink gradient. Oh, well. It was a cloudy day anyway. Hopefully the cab driver would know enough to sell them instead of throwing them out, or maybe he’d give them to his wife and she could be the envy of her Saturday book club, never knowing where the glasses had come from, just a spontaneous gift from God.

Allison had one rolling suitcase containing a week’s worth of clothes, a change of shoes, and a 12-inch vinyl: Joni Mitchell’s _Blue_. She felt the fabric of the bag for the outline of the record to make sure it was intact before she pushed open the gate. Allison wasn’t generally a superstitious person, but if it had been broken, she might have turned around and gone back to California. Any excuse.

Allison hesitated at the door. Should she ring the bell? Her finger hovered over the button, but before she could press it, the door swung open and Pogo was smiling weakly at her. Although he wore a plum-colored suit and paisley tie she knew well, he seemed shorter than she remembered, his face more leathery. What was the lifespan of a chimpanzee? Had whatever Dad had done to make Pogo _Pogo_ also given him a longer life? She had never asked. When she was a kid, it had seemed safe to assume that Pogo had always lived at the Academy and would continue to do so until the end of the world.

She hugged him. She had to lean down to do it. He smelled of shoe polish and plain soap.

“It’s good to see your face, Miss Allison,” Pogo said.

She followed him inside. The foyer was shadowy and quiet, and the archways to the side and above opened up onto more darkened rooms.

“I went to New Orleans this spring and people there called me ‘Miss Allison,’” she said. “It made me think of you.”

“I’m glad to hear courtesy still survives somewhere. Would you like some tea?”

“No, thanks — or, actually, yes. That would be nice.”

Pogo switched on the light to illuminate the hallway leading down to the kitchen.

“Where’s Dad?” Allison asked.

“Your father is due back this evening,” Pogo said. Allison didn’t ask from where. She ran her hand along the wall as they went, dipping her fingers into all the holes and scuffs. Pogo’s cane thumped on the floor.

There was already somebody in the kitchen. It was a man, seated at the table, eyeing the steam curling up from his mug as if it might tell him something. Diego. He wore long sleeves – Diego always wore long sleeves, to hide the knife he liked to keep strapped to his left wrist, a small one of some particular make Allison couldn’t remember the name of. His sweater was army-green, with a hole at the shoulder he’d sewn closed with black thread, the stitches haphazard and raised like a scar. He looked up at the sound of footsteps in the doorway. His face, in the time since she’d seen him, had lost its boyishness. The real scar on his head was worse than Allison remembered, like someone careless with a pen had made a stray stroke five inches long and split his face from ear to cheek. He had a fresh wound, too, a gash on his other eyebrow held closed with a butterfly bandage. Looking at him, Allison had a thought she’d never had before, which was that Diego was a scary-looking person. He looked like somebody who might stab you.

“Dad’s not here,” Diego said, sparing her from having to speak first.

Allison swallowed. “Yeah. Pogo said.”

Pogo thumped over to the sink to refill the kettle.

“What kind would you like, Miss Allison?” He asked. “We are well stocked, as always.”

“What are you having?” Allison asked Diego.

“I don’t know.” Diego looked at the tag dangling over the side of his mug. “It’s green.”

“Let’s do green. And I can make it, Pogo. I’m sure you’re… “ She couldn’t decide whether to say _busy_ or _tired_.

“Yes,” Pogo said anyway. “I should get things ready for when Master Hargreeves returns.”

He started to leave, but stopped in the doorway,

“It does warm my heart to see you here again,” he said, and then vanished into the hallway, leaving Allison and Diego alone in the kitchen.

Allison considered hugging him, but decided against it. Instead, she sat down on the opposite side of the table, and they both listened to the decrescendo of Pogo’s footsteps as he returned to the front of the house. Diego went back to staring at the steam still rising from his mug.

“Do you even like tea?” Allison asked, once the thump of Pogo’s cane had faded down to nothing.

Diego shrugged. He peered into his mug. “Do you think this is decaf?”

“Absolutely,” Allison said, and they both looked away to smile.

The kettle whistled. Allison found the box of green tea – decaf – and tore open a bag. At least Dad was letting Pogo order bagged tea sometimes now instead of insisting on loose leaf. Diego wasn’t wearing his harness, but it was draped over the back of the chair next to him, like a jacket, the knives glinting in the light of the kitchen’s single lamp. He kept glancing over at it, as if unsure that taking it off had been the right decision. Did he wear it now, just around? What did people think? Allison coughed.

“Vanya?” she asked.

“Been and gone,” Diego replied. “She had… something. Violin related. She’ll be back, though.”

“Klaus?”

Diego shook his head.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Allison said.

“And that’s everybody,” Diego said.

“Yeah,” Allison sighed. “That’s everybody.”

Allison took a sip of tea even though it was hot enough that she burned her tongue and felt it sliding down her throat like she’d swallowed a coal. She’d read somewhere that green tea was only supposed to be brewed at two-thirds boiling, otherwise it would be bitter. At this temperature, there wasn’t really any flavor at all, but she supposed it didn’t matter.

She looked at the back of Diego’s head. The last time they’d spoken, he’d called her a _fucking demon_. They’d been fighting over something of Ben’s, a book or a photograph they both claimed Ben had wanted them to have, and she’d tried to rumor Diego into giving it to her, or forgetting it existed. She only got as far as “I heard a–” when he tackled her, like a football player, at the waist, and they both crashed into Ben’s dresser and then onto the floor. She’d been afraid for a moment that he was going to pull a knife, but instead, all their training vanished and they slapped at each other like children, elbowing and pulling hair. The scuffle knocked the snow globe Ben had bought after a mission in Paris to the floor and shattered it, glass and water and white glitter everywhere, the little Eiffel Tower snapped in half. Diego had gotten up, a piece of glass in his palm and his scar, which was new then, stark white and angry, and he’d said it very evenly and deliberately, the way he spoke when he was trying consciously not to stutter.

She and Diego had both lived in the house for another two months at least, but they’d avoided each other extraordinarily well, both of them looking straight ahead if they were forced to pass each other in the hallway. He’d left before her, without warning. Klaus, at the time, was already gone – Vanya, too. Allison had spent a lot of time with Luther, those last few weeks.

Diego stood up, carried his mug to the counter, and poured the tea down the sink. He was carrying a visible knife, on his thigh.

“I haven’t seen Mom,” he said. “Pogo says she’s resting, but she’s not where she usually sleeps. I’m gonna see if I can find her.”

“Okay,” Allison said. Before she could offer to help, or say anything else at all, he unhooked his knives from the chair with one hand and strode out of the room.

Allison gripped her cup and blinked back new tears. She let Diego’s footsteps fade, too, then poured out her tea, left the mug in the sink, and followed. She went back to where she’d left her suitcase in the foyer, but it wasn’t there. Maybe Mom was up and about after all. Allison had never known her to charge anywhere but the gallery, but things could have changed.

She did notice differences as she meandered over to the section of the house that included the children’s bedrooms. One hallway had been re-wallpapered, and a light fixture that had been broken for as long as Allison could remember had been replaced. Some furniture was out of place, but only enough to be mildly disconcerting rather than truly jarring.

The posters along the bedroom hall were still there: GOUGE. DISARM. KNEE. THROW. They’d seemed so normal when she was a kid, but they looked wrong now, disturbing, a parody of the paraphernalia of childhood. The first time she’d found herself in a normal classroom with posters sporting messages like READ or BE KIND, she’d felt a sort of sliding away from herself, a fear that at any moment she would be found out as a foreigner. She’d been there to read to some second-graders, mostly so a photographer could take pictures of her reading to second-graders. Those kids probably hadn’t known what the word “gouge” meant.

She found her suitcase in her room, which was untouched except for a fresh set of sheets on the bed, all her teenage jewelry still in its place as if she’d left a week ago instead of five years. The zipper caught a little when she opened the suitcase; it was over-full. Joni Mitchell rested on top of one of Allison’s shirts, blue-filtered, eyes downcast like a saint’s. Allison had wanted something romantic and melancholy to take with her when she’d left. She’d always meant to mail it back, but had never quite gotten around to it.

The door to Luther’s room was slightly ajar, so all she had to do was push it to make it swing open. There had been few updates to his boyhood bedroom: his twin bed was still there, his checkered curtains, the space posters, the general clutter of his desk. The only thing was that his records, the one thing he liked to keep organized, were everywhere. Some were stacked in columns next to the shelves or by the bed, others strewn haphazardly across the floor. Of the albums still on the shelves, most were turned spine in, a few horizontal. It looked like somebody had been trying to arrange them according to an alien code, or some esoteric aesthetic concern. Had Dad done this, afterwards, looking for something? Dad had never taken a particular interest in Luther’s records, as far as Allison knew. They were like Klaus’s drawings or the little plays she used to bully everybody into putting on: a harmless diversion, permissible as long as they were kept to designated free time.

Allison picked her way across the floor and set the Joni Mitchell down on the bed. She sat next to it. The blanket was scratchy. There was a book on the bedside table, which surprised her, since Luther had never been much of a reader of novels. It was the fourth Harry Potter book, a worn paperback copy with a spine so cracked that the only thing that kept it from dividing into two discrete halves was a surprisingly strong piece of scotch tape. The cover was bent back, exposing the blocky writing on the blank page at the front: “Ben Hargreeves 6.” There was also an index card tucked inside, on which Ben had written, in the neater handwriting of an older boy, “Do NOT take without asking. This means YOU, Klaus.”

The book brought on another bout of crying. This had to end soon, the waterworks. She was going to dry out, shrivel like a prune. This one was shorter, at least. She was wiping her face on her sleeve before the block of light cast by the open window had moved an inch across the floor.

Allison took a deep breath, then knelt next to the nearest stack of records and started sorting through them. Chuck Berry, Bjork, and Blur went in a pile to her left, and Chick Corea and The Clash next to them, then Duran Duran… She thought about putting on a record, some of that 80s pop that Luther inexplicably loved, but she ended up sticking it on top of the stereo and leaving it there while she worked in silence. The task eventually developed a rhythm of its own: making sure all the records were in their proper sleeves, ordering them by artist and, within that, chronologically by album, and finally sliding the newly organized stacks back into their places on the shelf. Some of the records had clearly not been moved in a long time before recently, and she had to clean the dust off of them with the hem of her shirt. There were a few that she remembered Luther buying, on outings or post-mission, but mostly they were unfamiliar to her, worn out by a love that was Luther’s own. She tried to imagine asking him about each one, where he’d gotten to it, whether he listened to it all the time or not at all, but she gave up quickly. It was too hard to make up the answers.

She’d reached M (My Chemical Romance) when Diego appeared in the doorway, his hand gripping the frame.

“What are you doing?” he asked. His face was wary. He was wearing all his equipment again, and it was unkind to think that he looked stupid, but he looked stupid, a grown man playing cowboy. A section of the harness that had frayed was held together with electrical tape, some of which dangled at his rib.

Allison, boxed in by records on all sides, found herself at a loss for an explanation.

“They were all – everywhere,” she said.

Diego looked at her, then at the piles of albums littering the floor. His hand dropped from the doorframe, and Allison wasn’t sure if the gesture meant he was about to enter the room or leave it.

A muffled thud came from down the hall, and Allison and Diego both turned to the sound. His hand resting lightly on one of the knives at his side, Diego slipped away from the door, slowly, careful to place his feet on the sections of the floor that didn’t creak. Allison put down the records she’d been sorting and followed, barefoot. Her heels were abandoned next to the bed. They crept along the floor, Diego and then Allison, not really walking together, just headed in the same direction. The thud was followed by a shuffling coming from the bedroom two doors down from Luther’s. Had that one belonged to Vanya, or Klaus? Allison felt like she sometimes got this part of the house jumbled in her head. The bedrooms were always rearranging in her dreams, Alice in Wonderland style, one suddenly spacious as a cathedral, another tiny, never in an order that made sense.

Diego held up a hand in his old on-duty gesture that meant she should hold her position. There was another thud, and Allison thought it might be an animal – there had once been a memorable incident with a very confused woodchuck on this floor – but then she heard a decidedly human grunt and what sounded like a swear word, or a string of them. Diego’s free hand hovered over the doorknob. He mouthed a countdown: _One, two, three…_

He pushed the door open and sprang back, weapon ready, but dropped his hands when he saw a person who was almost certainly Klaus, although it was difficult to see his face because he was halfway through the process of climbing in through the window. His skinny legs were hooked around the window pane at the knee, and he clung to the bedpost with both hands. The result was that he was suspended in the air like a gangly hammock. Allison and Diego watched as he pulled one leg the rest of the way inside, lost his grip on the bedpost, and buckled into the space between the wall and the bed.

Klaus was stuck for a moment, one elbow on the bedspread, pleather-clad legs sticking up toward the ceiling. He was wearing cloth shoes, salmon-colored and laceless, like a middle-aged woman would wear. With some effort, he managed to swing his legs to the right and scramble up into a kneeling position. He peered out from behind the bed like a soldier from a foxhole. When he saw Allison and Diego in the doorway, he groaned.

“So much for a stealthy entrance,” he said. “How are you, my darling family? Don’t answer that. Where’s Vanya? Don’t answer that, either. Pretend you didn’t see me.”

And he turned around and put his head and shoulders back through the open window.

“Whoa, hey,” Diego shouted, and he and Allison rushed forward. Diego grabbed Klaus’s elbow while Allison got a fistful of his shirt, and they hauled him back inside with one great rowing motion. Klaus wasn’t difficult to throw around. He was even skinnier than he had been, nearly skeletal, with ribs showing underneath his shirt. He had new tattoos, including two on the palms of his hands that Allison couldn’t see properly because his hands were balled up into fists.

“Alright, alright, get off me,” Klaus said. “Jesus. Hello to you, too.”

Allison went to the window and looked down. The kids’ bedrooms were on the second floor, but there was a roof that jutted out from the laundry room underneath and a medium-sized tree next to that with good thick branches.

“Did you used to sneak out this way when we were kids?” Diego asked.

Klaus nodded. “I remember it being easier. The camera never covered the window.” The second part in response to Allison’s frown.

“Lucky,” Allison said.

They all looked at each other, unsure of what to do next.

“Is Dad here?” Klaus asked, as if the idea had only just occurred to him.

Diego shook his head. “He’s coming back soon.”

“Allegedly,” Allison added.

“Yeah, according to Pogo. And Vanya, too, she was here earlier, but she had a — “

“A violin thing,” said Allison.

“A violin thing, yeah,” Diego concluded.

Klaus stood up. He was taller than he used to be. He must have had a late growth spurt, or else Allison was misremembering him.

“Well, at least one of us has a real job,” Klaus said, fishing around in his pockets for something, which, because his pants were so tight, involved only his index finger. He slapped at where his back pockets would be, then visibly remembered that he didn’t have any.

“Hey!” Allison crossed her arms. “I have a real job.”

Klaus snorted. “No, you don’t.”

Allison, out of some weird lingering habit, looked at Diego for support. He shook his head.

“No, you don’t,” he agreed.

“Wow. Jerks.”

Diego went to the window and peered out, as if their father might swoop in out of the sky. The sun was lower than Allison would have expected. While she’d been in Luther’s room, the afternoon had ripened and become a perfect late summer evening, golden light haloing the buildings and making the shadows stretch like cats. Klaus and Diego coughed at the same time.

“Did you find Mom?” Allison asked.

Diego took a long breath. “Yeah. She’s in one of the guest bedrooms, and she’s off.”

“What do you mean, ‘off’?” Klaus asked.

“She’s sleeping? Charging?” added Allison.

“No, she’s _off._ I couldn’t wake her up.”

Klaus shook his head. “She’s never been off. Does Dad… do that now? Does he just…?” He said it as if the words themselves were something slimy, and he edged closer to the window.

“Well, Pogo said she was resting,” Allison said.

“Off is not resting,” said Diego. “Off is _off_. I mean, what if—“

The loudspeaker crackled. Pogo’s voice floated tinnily down from the ceiling.

“Everyone please report to the drawing room. Please report to the drawing room.”

Diego shook his head. “I haven’t missed that.”

Vanya was already there, dwarfed by both the huge fireplace behind her and her own shirt, which was at least two sizes too big. Her wan face peeking out over the collar appeared almost disembodied. She smiled, thinly.

Allison wasn’t sure why, but she’d expected Vanya to be changed, more so than the others, whose stubborn sameness did not surprise her and was almost comforting. They’d always had a clear trajectory to their lives which felt as if it could be derailed but not altered, not in its substance. Allison could have guessed at Diego and his sweater, or Klaus’s apparent determination to become so thin he might disappear entirely. In contrast, someone could have told her Vanya had done anything, become anyone, and Allison would have believed it. Her sister had become vaguer and vaguer in her mind as the years went by, a sketch of a person Allison, or Vanya herself, had neglected to finish.

Yet here she was, the same. Allison was pretty sure she recognized that shirt from when they were teenagers. There had been no late growth spurts for Vanya.

Without discussing it, they’d spread out into a line: Diego on Allison’s left, Klaus on her right, Vanya about ten feet away like an outlying datum. They were in order. Allison moved into the gap between Klaus and Vanya, taking a simple pleasure in ruining it: two, four, three, seven.

Allison and Vanya hugged briefly, and Allison was struck by the familiarity of even the smell of her, resin and sweat and that ridiculous men’s body wash she liked.

“Hey, sis,” Allison said, a habit of address she’d picked up from TV sitcoms and realized too late wasn’t something people actually said. The hug was squeezeless, Vanya’s hands light on her back.

Pogo sat shuffling through a stack of papers on the coffee table. Diego squinted at a spot on the floor next to his left shoe, as if by staring at it long enough he could will something to appear there.

“Where’s Dad?” Vanya asked.

Pogo cleared his throat and smoothed down his tie. He stood up.

“Unfortunately, your father cannot be called away from his business in South America,” he announced.

“Business?” Diego spat, at the same time that Vanya breathed, “South America?” and Klaus giggled, a hysterical little titter. Meanwhile, Allison looked for the emotion she’d been swimming in all day, but it had retreated somewhere inside of her, an animal sensing a predator. She felt made of stone.

“He sends his apologies and stresses the need for unity in this time of loss,” Pogo continued. “I have here the mission report from Luther’s last mission, as well as building schematics and other information– ”

“Stop. Stop it, Pogo,” Diego said. “Are you serious? Dad wants to, what? Turn this into a mission? Luther – Jesus Christ, we came here for a _funeral_.”

“Everyone grieves in their own way, Master Diego,” Pogo said. “If your father thought that it was best for him to be here, he would be here.”

“No, he’s not here because he can’t look any of us in the fucking eye.” Diego pointed his finger at Pogo, his voice rapidly rising to a shout. Meanwhile, Klaus’s giggle became a full-blown laugh. He collapsed into the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands, wheezing.

Vanya began to cry, quietly, her face angled toward the window as if that might prevent the others from noticing. Allison turned away from her, embarrassed, and her eyes fell on Diego’s scar, white as an eggshell against his skin. She remembered when he’d gotten it, the way the blood had soaked the shoulder of his uniform and gathered in little pools in the divots of his collarbone as he stood next to her in line, hands screwed into fists at his back, while Dad gave them all a dressing-down about protocol. Bravery is commendable, as is sacrifice, but you’re no use to me or the world dead. Dad had let him bleed, Allison realized, for almost a half an hour to drive the point home before letting Mom administer first aid. She’d never thought about that before. If Dad had tried to do that to her, she would have used her power to make him stop. But she’d been there. She could have done it then. Why hadn’t she?

“Luther was an idiot,” Diego was saying.

Allison snapped back to the present. “Diego.”

Diego scoffed at her. “I don’t have to listen to this.”

Klaus guffawed. “To what? Yourself?”

“Shut up, Klaus.”

And Diego walked out. There was no door for him to slam, only an archway, so they listened to his footsteps fade and disappear into some other corner of the house. Not out the front door, or at least Allison didn’t think so. Maybe he’d gone back to Mom.

Klaus took a deep breath in through his nose and clapped his hands against his thighs.

“Well, that’s my cue,” he said. “It’s been great catching up. I’ll see you all when Dad finally kicks it. Pass along my love, would you Pogo?” He flipped his middle finger. Allison looked at Pogo, expecting a scandalized “Master Klaus!”, but Pogo only looked tired.

Once Klaus had swept out of the room, Vanya wiped her face on her cuffed sleeve.

“We shouldn’t have even come,” she sniffled. “We should have expected Dad to…”

Allison looked up at the portrait of Dad. His gaze addressed some point above their heads, expression stern even in paint. “Yeah.”

Pogo sat down on the couch, and he leaned forward so his suit jacket rumpled. There was gray among the tufts of hair around his eyes and the backs of his hands. He pulled at a patch on his left that was almost white.

“Sorry, Pogo,” Allison said, though she wasn’t sure who she was apologizing for.

He waved her off. “No matter.”

Then he said something they had only ever heard like this, from him, secondhand: “Your father loves you.”

Allison caught up with Klaus in the kitchen, where he was stealing the good silverware. He glanced up at her, raised an eyebrow, and went back to polishing a spoon with the fabric of his shirt.

“You gonna tell on me?” he asked, holding the spoon in front of his face to check his teeth in his reflection.

Allison crossed her arms. “How are you planning to carry that?”

Klaus looked down at himself. “Shit. You don’t have a bag, do you?”

The silverware was some kind of antique set their father said he’d gotten in New York “a hundred years ago.” Dad wasn’t the type to exaggerate, except about time. If you believed the huge numbers he threw around, he’d have to be well over 200. He had always been reluctant to talk about his youth, his education, the father from whom he’d inherited his wealth, as if the fact of his ever having been a child were a dangerous thing to admit to his own children. Things like the silverware had fascinated Allison as a girl, evidence of a life he’d lived before this house or the Academy. Someone had loved him, maybe, once.

Allison gave Klaus her clutch, in which he managed to fit four forks, three spoons, and knife with a squat handle. He looked as if he might leave, but instead he put his arms around her, his sharp chin tucked into the hollow of her shoulder. She linked her hands together at the center of his back and closed her eyes. His shoulder blades convulsed once, twice, three times, and he made a strangled little gulping noise, like a muffled sneeze on the train.

She thought: I miss you, asshole. Tell me what you’ve been doing. Promise me you won’t die doing it. Enough of us have died.

She said, “Diego’s outfit looks stupid, right?”

Klaus disentangled himself from her arms and frowned thoughtfully, his hands still on her shoulders.

“No,” he said, his eyes wet. “No. It looks gay, is what it looks like.”

Allison stifled a giggle.

“I’m serious!” said Klaus. “If he wants to communicate heterosexuality, he should lay off the leather straps.”

“And Vanya—“

“Don’t even get me started on her.”

“I meant she hasn’t changed.”

“No. Same old Vanya.”

He hoisted himself up onto the counter so his feet dangled. The salmon shoes made his feet look long, feminine. He wore no socks.

“Whose shoes are those?” Allison asked.

“Huh? Oh, these.” Klaus wiggled his toes. Allison could see it through the fabric. “I borrowed them.”

“Sure you did.”

Klaus opened his mouth in mock offense. “I can’t believe my own sister would accuse me of theft.” He gestured at her with the clutch; the silverware rattled traitorously inside. She laughed.

It was quiet enough in the kitchen that Allison could hear the buzz of the refrigerator. Klaus picked at the paint on one of his fingernails.

“Why did you come back?” he asked.

Allison sighed. “Honestly? I think I thought I might find Luther.”

Klaus raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if it were a night sky he could scan for constellations. “Do you know what happened?”

“No. Maybe we should have let Pogo finish.”

“Nah.”

Klaus leaned back against the wall — his head jostled a ladle — and dragged both hands down his face. He pulled the skin away from his eye sockets, tugged his mouth into an artificial frown, then released it all with a groan.

“I feel just about ready to fall in love,” he said, smiling. “Don’t you?”

Not knowing what else to do, Allison let her feet carry her back up to Luther’s room. Maybe she’d finish organizing the records, but really she just felt like falling asleep. She kept swallowing into her dry throat. She was starting to worry that the stone in her stomach might be permanent.

The day she’d said goodbye to him: I’ll come visit, she’d said. She hadn’t. I’ll write to you, she’d said. She barely ever had.

There was noise coming from Luther’s room, the clean sound of record sleeves sliding against each other, the occasional squeak of a shoe.

“Mom?” Allison called. She approached the open door.

It was Diego, on his knees. His head was bowed, sorting through records. He nodded to acknowledge her, then returned to his work, flipping over a Tiffany album to check the date. Tiffany herself smiled playfully on the front, holding her oversized denim jacket closed with both hands as if her T-shirt had a secret printed on it. The popped collar made Allison want to laugh. The cover had torn, toward the bottom. Diego went to Luther’s desk and opened one drawer, pushed some junk aside, closed it, opened another, and pulled out a roll of clear scotch tape. He removed the record from the sleeve and taped up the tear with the precision of a surgeon, first the inside, then the outside. When he was finished, you could still see the tear creeping up the seam of Tiffany’s jeans and onto her hand, a little white scar marring her wholesome 80s thumb. Diego swore under his breath. He tapped his own forehead with his knuckles, as if trying to check if anybody was home.

Moving slowly, like she might to avoid startling an animal, Allison crouched down next to Diego and held out a hand.

“It can’t get any worse, at least,” she said, gesturing to the tear. He handed her the record, and she slid it into its spot on the shelf, where it fit with a click, a puzzle piece settling into place, the jean jacket and feathered hair disappearing and leaving just a spine, slender and blue, _I Think We’re Alone Now_.


	8. Klaus

The unseasonable heat continued, but Maude’s apartment was cool and dark as a cocoon. Klaus watched the chimes kissing the window but found he couldn’t hear them. His body felt buoyant, and the same moment looped like a familiar face coming around and around again on a carousel: the chimes touched each other, twinkling in the sun, and Maude touched him, her hand skimming his shoulder like a bird over the surface of the water as she walked by on her way to the bathroom. The whole world was touching itself. Here it came again: the chimes reflected light soundlessly; Maude’s fingers grazed his bare arm. He sank deeper into her embroidered couch pillow, which said, in Easter-pink thread, “A Sister is Worth A Thousand Friends.” Maude didn’t have a sister, as far as he knew. Funny weird. Funny ha-ha.

“Klaus,” whispered a voice.

Klaus raised his head.

“No,” he said. “No no no no no no no.” He pulled the pillow over his head and squeezed his eyes shut. But being under the pillow made him feel claustrophobic, and eventually he had to open one eye and peek through one of the tassels. The dead man, the one from the party, crouched next to the couch so their faces were level. He was clothed now, which was unusual, a change like that in a ghost, and though his face was still unfamiliar, Klaus could have sworn he’d seen the jacket someplace before, drab green with a collar so out of fashion as to be in it again. He gave Klaus a little wave, lips pressed together in mild embarrassment, or expectation. He smelled of nothing.

“Will you just go away?” Klaus groaned, pressing his face back into the couch cushion.

“You mean, like, move on?” the ghost said. He was still whispering. “I don’t think I know how. I feel like I’m… stuck in God’s throat, you know?”

Klaus wasn’t sure he liked the implication that when you died, God swallowed you.

“Well, figure it out. And stop whispering. Literally nobody else can hear you.”

“Oh. Right.”

Klaus counted to ten, then lifted a corner of the pillow to look out again. The ghost smiled sheepishly at him. He had a square face, and his smiling only made it squarer, widening his jaw until it seemed almost the length of his head. Klaus threw the pillow at him; it went straight through and landed on the rug with a lackluster _pff_.

“Listen, I think you’re supposed to help me,” said the ghost.

“Everybody thinks that.” Klaus sat up. Resolutely not looking at the dead man, he rolled a joint on the coffee table – Maude’s weed, but she wouldn’t mind. “You think you’re going to resolve something and then fade away into the light, yay, smiles all around, but, trust me, you’re just dead. The time for resolutions has passed. Welcome to the afterlife, sweetheart.”

Klaus lit the joint and took his time letting the smoke fill his lungs. He exhaled a cloud toward the ghost’s face, and it briefly occupied the same space as his head, swirling behind his eyes and over-under his skin like teeming thoughts. If Klaus waved his hand through him right now, he thought, the entire man would dissipate.

“Look,” the ghost said. “I’m not asking you to solve my murder, although that would be nice. I just want you to give something to my sister.”

Klaus closed his eyes. It had been a long time since he’d dealt with someone so recently dead. Newer ghosts were both more coherent and harder to shake, chemically. He remembered a bog person he’d met once in Florida, two thousand years gone, animal-like. It had wailed at him wordlessly, pawing at his chest with a muddy hand like the one thing in the universe it still understood was how to reach for him. The eyes, wide enough that the irises were ringed all in white, were wet with the anguish of someone who had been waiting, all that time, for someone, for Klaus, while he failed to show, why, why, why hadn’t he come sooner? He’d stumbled backwards, fallen into waist-deep water, and had to wear a sodden uniform for the rest of the day. For months, he’d dreamt of it. This guy might get there eventually, if he stuck around. Death was a bitch like that. His eyes, for now, were gray and ordinary.

“What’s your name?” Klaus asked.

“Payam.”

“Okay, Payam. Let’s say we go see your sister. Will you then agree to cease all haunting-related activities in perpetuity?”

Payam’s ghost extended his hand. They mimed shaking on it as best they could.

Klaus sighed and inhaled, exhaled smoke.

“Well,” he said. “I’m going to need ice cream.”

They went to Payam’s place first. His apartment was in Bumbershoot, which was midway through its transformation from a Bad Neighborhood to an up-and-coming hipster utopia. (“What happened last night?” Klaus remembered people saying when he first started hanging around there. “A Bumber _shooting_.” Now there was a place on the corner selling gluten-free bagels.) Payam lived, or had lived before he died, in a building whose front door was shedding its paint in huge flakes, and Klaus tried not to be cynical about whether that was true neglect or a gentrification-chic aesthetic choice.

Payam (his ghost, his _echo_ ) babbled at Klaus the whole way there on the subway, fretted when Klaus jumped the turnstile, pointed out things on the route he’d hated or enjoyed during his life. There was the homeless man in the Bumbershoot station he’d never given any money to even though he’d passed him all the time, always thinking that he would do it the next day, or the next. There was the waffle place he’d loved – did it smell good? He couldn’t smell anything now. Klaus tried not to listen as Payam told him his goddamn life story on the way up the street. He was from a small town in Michigan, originally, and he’d nearly gone to Michigan State on a track scholarship, but he’d moved out here instead for the art scene, and his sister had followed him a few years later to study economics. They hadn’t wanted to be far apart. Klaus was starting to see what might have attracted him to Payam, during that party he couldn’t remember. He was a sucker for midwestern boys, boys who called their mothers once a week and had things like track scholarships and who might consider Klaus dangerous and exciting instead of sad. Boys with gray eyes and childhood pets and thoughts about God. Oo, baby, tell me about the house you grew up in. Tell me about your _yard._

Klaus didn’t look at Payam while Payam directed him to the spare key hidden in a fake rock half-buried by the side of the house. He didn’t look at Payam the whole way up the stairs. He worried that if he looked, he’d see that grisly apparition again, a naked thing with marbles for eyes expelling afterthoughts of blood onto its shell of a skin.

“Are you okay?” Payam asked when they’d reached the third floor. Klaus dragged his eyes over to him; he looked normal. Clothed. You could almost forget he was dead, except for that there was a stillness about him now that made Klaus want to look away again. He wasn’t breathing. Whatever material made up his ghost body must have figured out that he didn’t need to. It looked wrong, like something definitively not human wearing a human suit. Klaus’s breath caught in his chest in compulsive imitation.

“What do I do if one of your neighbors sees me?” Klaus asked, mostly for something to say. “I don’t want to get arrested because somebody thinks I’m robbing your grave.”

Payam frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that. You could say my parents sent you to get something.”

Klaus raised his eyebrows. “Do I look like your parents sent me?”

“Good point. Let’s just get inside. My roommates are never home on Saturdays, at least.”

It was a bare, student-looking place, with cream walls that looked like they had about ten coats of paint on them and a couch that sagged in the middle. Was it Saturday? That meant Luther had died on Thursday night. Payam, too. How depressing, to die on a Thursday night. Worse than Wednesday, even. Klaus had always wanted to die on a Sunday morning, just as the sun was coming up.

“Here’s my bedroom,” said Payam. There was a mattress of the floor, an Ikea bookshelf full to bursting, and magazines, piles and stacks of them in various states of deconstruction. Some had sections cut from the covers; others lay open displaying stubs where pages had been torn out. A desk against the far wall was covered with bottles of glue, scissors, precision knives, and paints – Klaus tried not to think of Luther’s model-making supplies, sitting idle in his bedroom – and a four-by-four canvas out of which peered a huge octopus, glistening and imperious. It was made of what looked like hundreds of scraps of blue-green paper resting on a blue-black painted sea. Being part of the octopus made the glossiness of the magazine paper look wet. The creature’s one visible eye, a glittering wheel of color containing a black slit empty enough to fall into, was, once Klaus got close enough to see, in fact a photograph of a field of stars, like you might find in The Planetary Report (Luther had had a subscription), its center blacked out with Sharpie. Klaus was not sober enough to be looking at this thing. It watched him. He was certain of this. It knew things.

“I do collage,” Payam said, almost apologetically. “I guess I’ll never finish that one.”

Klaus realized that he was close enough to the octopus that his nose was nearly touching its eye. He stepped back. The room smelled of paper and glue. It was probably what Payam had smelled like, when he was alive.

“You know, you’re taking this whole death thing pretty well, all things considered,” Klaus said.

Payam shrugged. “It’ll hit me eventually. Or maybe it won’t, I don’t know.” He looked around the room. “It’s not like my life was really going anywhere.”

Klaus scanned the bookshelf. A lot of novels. The Stranger, something with a spaceship on it, a book called Frankenstein in Baghdad, A Little Life. That one had been big with the queers when it came out. He remembered people trying to talk to him about it at parties he’d snuck into.

“So, have you always been able to, you know…see dead people?” Payam asked.

Klaus opened his mouth to answer, but a sound from the hallway made him pause: a key turning in the lock. The door creaked open, and somebody coughed. Payam and Klaus looked at each other.

“Hide,” Payam hissed.

Klaus mouthed, _“You don’t need to whisper!”_ but let himself be ushered into the closet, where there was another mound of magazines that came nearly up to his knee. He climbed on top of them and pulled his knees up to his chin in order to get the door to close, just glimpsing a cover or two (People from April of 2001 and The New Yorker, 2016) before it was all plunged into darkness. With the door shut, the only light was a narrow strip of yellow underneath the door that reached an inch across the floor and then hit a wall of blackness and was obliterated. It was the only evidence of the shape of the space he was in; otherwise, the closet may as well have been a pile of magazines and some clothes suspended in an endless night. Hanging winter coats brushed Klaus’s face and accordioned against his shoulders and the top of his head. He put his hand down next to his thigh, but his sweaty palm stuck to a magazine cover, and he had to shake it off like a bug. His hand hit the wall to the right. He followed it until he hit the wall behind him.

“Hey, Payam,” he said. “You should know that I don’t really like enclosed sp–”

“Shh.”

Footsteps approached from the hallway and then stopped. A floorboard creaked. Klaus tried his best to quiet his breathing, which was a challenge, because what he really wanted to do right now was have a good long hyperventilation. What if the door got stuck, and he couldn’t get out? What if he died here, trapped with Payam the Incorporeal Midwestern Boy? He wanted to die outside! In the sun! On a Sunday morning, goddammit!

“It’s either Dave or Will,” Payam said, still whispering, the idiot. In the dark, Klaus could almost convince himself he could feel Payam’s weight beside him, his breath in Klaus’s ear. “I don’t know what either of them would be doing home. They both usually work on Saturday afternoons. He probably just forgot something.”

The footsteps started again, but they didn’t pass by on their way to one of the other rooms. Instead, they came inside Payam’s room, within feet of the closet, and stopped again.

“Hey, what’s he coming in my room for? If he messes with my shit…”

Klaus put his hands over his ears. The closet was getting smaller, it would crush him–

The person outside – Dave or Will – started to make a noise, a labored breathing followed by a hoarse moaning and swallowing that Klaus at first found unintelligible, like a sound an animal might make. The closet was normal-sized again, Klaus’s legs were cramping, and his face, he realized, was wet with tears. He’d been crying, and the only reason the guy on the other side of the door hadn’t heard him was because he was crying, too, alone in the center of the room. Payam and Klaus listened to him sniffle.

“Oh,” said Payam. “Um. It’s Will, I think.”

There was nothing to do except sit and wait for him to stop. Eventually, Klaus’s eyes adjusted enough to make out Payam’s outline in the dark. Another difference between the newer dead and older ones: very old ghosts were visible just as well in darkness as in the daytime. It wasn’t that they glowed; they just weren’t affected by how much light there was or wasn’t. It was a fact that had fascinated Dad. He’d done countless experiments, shining bright lights at ghosts or in Klaus’s face, shutting Klaus up in the dark – once, he’d made Klaus wear a blindfold for three days, in an attempt to trigger some perception of images of the dead independent of his eyes. Vanya had had to lead him around by the hand, and Ben had read to him, and Mom had sang to him, _I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone._ Had Dad programmed all those folk songs into Mom, or did she hear them somewhere? He’d seen her, once or twice, in Five’s room, after he was gone, listening to the crystal radio he’d built when they were nine. She liked listening to the baseball game. That, Klaus was certain she hadn’t gotten from Dad. Old Reggie had never been big on America’s Favorite Pastime.

Will the roommate’s sobs finally quieted to deep breaths. Payam swallowed audibly. “I didn’t – I mean, we were friends… Shit. I’m dead. I’m actually dead.”

Klaus moved as gently as he could to press his back against the closet wall. He closed his eyes. _I gave my love a chicken, it had no bone._

“We’re just going to have to wait for him to leave, I guess,” Payam said. “Unless you want to talk to him, although if I were him I’d probably think you had something to do with my murder. Will is totally the type to go all amateur detective on you. He thinks he’s really smart.”

Klaus didn’t have a watch, and even if he’d had one he wouldn’t have been able to see it in the dark, but it took Will a long time to leave. He puttered around the house, then was silent, but they didn’t hear the front door open and close.

“I’m dead,” Payam said again.

“Yep.”

“Hey, you’re whispering.”

“That’s because I can be heard by human ears.”

Somewhere, Will caused a floorboard to creak.

“Do you think there’s an afterlife? Or do you think this is it?”

“Oh my God, shut up.”

A long pause followed during which Klaus wished he were higher. Maybe he could sniff Payam’s glue. He hadn’t done that since he was a teenager.

“Um…” Payam said finally. “I spy with my little eye…”

“Are you seriously trying to play ‘I Spy’? I can’t see shit.”

“Sorry.”

Another rapid tattoo of footsteps made Klaus’s teeth clench. The closet door opened and light poured in. Klaus had almost forgotten it was the middle of the day — how long had he been awake? This was ungodly — so the light temporarily blinded him, and it took him a moment to register the broad-shouldered figure in an Nike sweatshirt haloed in the doorway. Klaus pulled his knees to his chest and flinched backwards, but there was nowhere to go. His legs poked out from behind the hanging coats, two pale and hairy little sticks ending in Maude’s cotton shoes, like a faggy Wicked Witch of the East. He held his breath.

Will didn’t scream at the sight of a scrawny white stranger in his dead roommate’s closet. Instead, he sighed and pulled the coat furthest to the right off its hanger. He examined it, felt around the hem with his thumb and forefinger, peered at the tag and its underside, shook the whole thing for good measure, then put it back. He did the same with the next coat, then the shirt beside it. As the clothes shifted on the hangers, Will’s face flashed in and out of Klaus’s view, red-eyed but calm, eyes scanning the closet but never once landing on the entire junkie seated on the floor.

Payam scoffed. “Bastard’s going through my clothes.” Klaus said nothing. After a minute, he tried clearing his throat. Will continued examining coats. Klaus hummed the chorus of “Call Me Maybe.” Nothing.

“Huh,” said Payam.

“Huh,” agreed Klaus.

Will returned the last jacket to its place, and, with another sigh, shut the closet door, and Payam and Klaus were once again in darkness. His footsteps faded and vanished with the click of the front door.

Klaus tumbled out of the closet and onto Payam’s bedroom floor. His legs ached from spending so long cramped into the same awkward position. His whole body ached.

“What did you just do?” he asked.

“I didn’t do anything!” Payam emerged from the closet after him in a much more dignified way, passing right through the hanging clothes and the pile of magazines as if they weren’t there. “You backed up into me.”

“And you turned me invisible?”

“That doesn’t usually happen to you?”

“No!”

“Oh.”

Klaus hauled himself to his feet and held out his hand, palm forward.

“Here, touch my hand. Or, put your hand on my hand. Whatever.”

Payam mirrored the gesture. He had fingers long enough that they could have curled over Klaus’s knuckle to nail, and there was a fleck of blue paint on the heel of his palm that must have been there when he died. Klaus found himself anticipating the resistance of Payam’s arm; he pushed his hand straight through Payam’s and had to back up until they occupied the same space. They stood there. Klaus counted the seconds. He could see Payam’s callouses, the little swirls of his fingerprints, a papercut on the pad of his ring finger that yawned bloodlessly when he stretched his hand. Payam stared at his own hand, which had become bluish and semi-translucent, the only indication that he and Klaus were touching. Klaus could see the white all the way around his eyes.

“What does that feel like?” Klaus asked, almost in a whisper. He had never asked a dead person that before. Tentatively, he wiggled his fingers back and forth. Payam’s hand crackled with electricity that Klaus could see but not hear. He remembered Luther explaining to him when they were kids how there was no sound in space, that the default state of the universe was a silence with no end. Luther had found that idea peaceful. It had freaked Klaus out.

Payam’s jaw no longer existed, or, rather, his jaw was somewhere across town in the cool darkness of a morgue drawer, stiff with rigor mortis, no use to anybody. A muscle clenched in it anyway as Payam met Klaus’s eyes.

“Nothing,” he breathed. He looked at the ceiling. His chest worked up and down in an attack of what seemed to be all the respiration he hadn’t done for the last day and a half. “How do we know if it’s working?”

Klaus dropped his hand. Payam, not able to feel when Klaus stopped touching him, took a moment to notice, and his hand hung in the air. Klaus looked at it and laughed.

“What?” Payam dropped his hand. Klaus raised his again.

“ _Stop,_ ” he sang. “ _In the naaaame of love… before you break my heart…_ ”

Payam crossed his arms. “Come on. Be serious.”

“ _Baby baby, I’m –_ uh, _aware where you go… each time you leave my dooooor…_ something something something …” He couldn’t remember if there was a dance to go with the verse, so he settled on a general shimmy.

“Has anybody ever told you you’re a terrible singer?”

“Shut up and do the dance with me. _Stop! In the name of loove…_ Come on, you’re dead! Nobody can see you.”

“You can see me!” 

“Be my backup dancer.”

Payam rolled his eyes. “You’re the backup dancer.”

Klaus shimmied, and Payam laughed, and, well, there was a thing Klaus never would have thought to put on his bucket list: make the dead laugh. It turned out the dead had a boyish little giggle with a snort. He wondered what Dad would think of that. Klaus extended his arm again for the chorus and was surprised when he saw his fingers shake.


	9. Vanya

Vanya had never slept well. It wasn’t that she had bad dreams. In fact, she never dreamed at all. Instead, she would lie on top of the sheets and drift in and out of a shallow unconsciousness until the sun came into her window like a punishment. Her medication didn’t help. Or maybe the insomnia was a side effect of the medication; she couldn’t remember. In any case, she’d spent what felt like half her life watching the moon crawl across ceilings in dark rooms. As a child, Mom used to sing to her. Mostly, she’d pretended to be asleep so Mom wouldn’t worry. In her adulthood, she’d tried everything — pills, breathing exercises, chamomile, wearing socks to bed, wearing no socks to bed — but nothing helped. In the end, she familiarized herself with late night television and the fluorescent lights of the 24-hour CVS, and she tried to make the best of things.

At 4:30 in the morning, her childhood bedroom seemed even smaller and grayer than she remembered. The moon was no longer visible, either set or dipped out of view, and the only light came from a lamp that Pogo had left on down the hall. The twin bed groaned whenever she moved. She propped her herself up on her elbow and watched the second hand make its journey around the face of her watch on the bedside table. 4:31. She flopped back down onto the pillow. It was at this time of night (morning?) that she most often found herself thinking about Five. Had he succeeded at what Dad forbade him to attempt and traveled in time? Where — when —- would he have gone? Was he alive? Did he know everything that had happened?

Sometimes, Vanya talked to Five with an urgency so specific it was almost praying. _I need you_ , she’d say, trying to beam the thought into the future or the past or whatever galaxy or alternate dimension he was living in. But he never came. Diego would say it was because he didn’t want to.

Vanya swung her feet out of bed and worked them into her sneakers without undoing the laces. She tiptoed into the hall. The house was silent: no Klaus crying out in his sleep, no Mom beeping gently in the gallery. If she listened, she could hear the house creaking with the wind and the occasional whisper of a car going by outside. Dad still hadn’t come back from wherever-it-was. She stopped at the open door of Luther’s bedroom and peered at the murky shapes of his model rockets and his weights, which resembled hunched creatures in the half-light. Vanya could count on one hand the times she’d been in Luther’s room. It had been a place one had to be invited to, his own little version of Dad’s study.

She was about to move on when a shape she had taken for a tangle of blankets on Luther’s bed stirred and unfolded itself. The figure had a set of narrow shoulders, and Vanya could just make out the wispy outlines of curls. 

“Vanya?” Allison said. She rubbed her eyes with her hand.

“Sorry,” Vanya murmured. She turned and fled back down the hallway.

Allison called after her in as loud a voice as the night allowed. Vanya stopped. Allison stepped into the yellow pool of the hallway lamp. She looked so much younger without makeup, like a kid again. The sweatpants she was wearing stopped halfway down her calves.

“I was just…” Allison trailed off. “I don’t know.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Vanya explained. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“I was going to go to CVS and get something. A candy bar or something.”

“Is Dad back?”

“I’ve been up most of the night. I would have heard him come in.”

Allison put her hands in her pockets and looked at Vanya, who dropped her eyes to a knot in the grain of the floor by Allison’s foot.

“Do you smoke?” Allison asked.

They went up to the roof, which involved climbing out an upstairs window and up a shaky metal ladder flaking with rust. From here, Vanya could see the moon partially obscured by tree branches like a child inexpertly hiding during a game. Earlier, she’d thought it was full, but it wasn’t quite. One side was perfectly round, while the other melted asymmetrically into blackness. The stars competed with both it and the city lights to be seen against the night sky. Vanya couldn’t make out any constellations, but she couldn’t have even at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. To her, they were nothing more than a random smattering of lights. She’d never been able to see anything else, even when someone tried to point out the patterns for her.

They stood for a while in silence, the lit ends of their cigarettes moving in the dark like fireflies.

“When did you start smoking?” Vanya asked.

Allison gave her a questioning look. “I smoked when we were teenagers.”

“Did you? I didn’t know.”

Birds had begun to sing in the courtyard and in the trees lining the street. Vanya inhaled and closed her eyes. She could hear sparrows on the street, a group of crows somewhere far off, and what sounded like two cardinals in the tree next to Ben’s statue. She exhaled smoke.

Allison frowned out over the rooftops and tangles of telephone wire.

“You know what I can’t stop thinking about?” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about how people in the past used to have as many children as they could because they knew that some would die. Dad always talked as if he had saved us, from whatever people might have done to us out there, but he…It was always going to be like this, wasn’t it?” Her face contorted as if with pain, but Vanya couldn’t see her face well enough in the moonlight to see if she was crying. “Luther wanted to come visit me. He wrote to me, like it had just popped into his head, but I think he’d been thinking about it for a while. He never got my response. I put it off.”

She inhaled wetly. Vanya’s hands hung at her sides, her cigarette smoldering down to nothing.

A car went by. Allison and Vanya watched it until its headlights disappeared around the corner.

“It’s all really over now,” Allison said.

Vanya felt her jaw tighten with an unfamiliar determination.

“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t.”


	10. Diego

Breaking into Pogo’s office wasn’t difficult for Diego – he had known how to pick a lock since he was eleven – but, once the door was open, he did trip on the saddle. The threshold to Pogo’s office was slightly higher than others in the house, and as a kid he’d always known to step over it, but he had forgotten, and all six feet of him nearly toppled into Pogo’s desk. He caught himself on his right hand, knocking over Pogo’s container of pens, which hit a framed photograph. The frame tipped over the edge of the desk and fell. Diego dipped his knees and caught it in his other hand. Grey dawn light was reaching through the curtains over the office’s single high window, and by it Diego could make out the outlines of all seven siblings. God, everyone was so skinny. How old were they in this picture, fourteen? No, Five was there, so they couldn’t be older than thirteen. Allison was still the second-tallest, after Luther. Diego hesitated, then put the photograph face down on the desk.

He took a deep breath and rifled through the papers on the desk. Pogo was less organized than he used to be; documents were strewn haphazardly in uneven piles. Monthly expenses – a new coat for Pogo, maintenance on the plane, damn, Dad spent more on sodium hydroxide solution than he did on food – an old calendar, measurements for the greenhouse… He started on the drawers.

“Diego.”

The whisper came from somewhere to Diego’s right. He spun around, a knife unsheathed and ready to throw before he knew he had reached for it.

“Diego, it’s us,” said a different voice. Two people emerged from behind Pogo’s long-defunct fax machine, one tall, the other small and rumpled. One of them went to the window and pulled the curtain aside, letting white dawn light pour into the room. Allison and Vanya. Diego gave the knife a spin and returned it to his harness.

“What are you two doing in here?” he asked. They hadn’t seen him trip on the way in, had they?

“What are you doing in here?” Vanya retorted, hands in her pockets.

Diego crossed his arms. There was no point in lying. “I’m looking for Luther’s mission file.”

Allison held up a large black folder with the Umbrella Academy logo on the front. Diego snatched it from her hand.

“Hey!” Allison hissed, at the same time Vanya said, “You might want to brace yourself.”

Diego opened the folder. The autopsy photos were on top. The room lurched. He was running toward Ben, the burst sack of blood that he had been, toward Luther, unzipped, dissassembled –He snapped the folder closed and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Told you,” Vanya said, but it was gentle.

Diego exhaled and carefully removed the pile of photos from the folder and turned them upside down on the desk before opening the file again. A mission report, put together by Dad, presumably, because Luther hadn’t gotten the chance to do it. Yep, there was Dad’s impenetrable cursive. Reginald Hargreeves couldn’t stand the clack of a keyboard. Diego pictured him, alone in his study, dark except for the glow of his desk lamp, writing deceased in the box for Luther’s post-mission status with one of his tall fountain pens.

“Luther was trying to stop some kind of ritual by a cult called the Brothers of the Void,” Allison said, keeping her voice low. “No one knows for sure what their deal is or what they’re after, but after a certain… level, or whatever, they all get a tattoo on their neck of a bl–”

“Black circle,” Diego finished for her.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve seen them before,” Diego explained. “They’ve been stealing trucks full of industrial algaecide on its way to the water treatment plant, but I couldn’t figure out why. They’re sneaky bastards.”

“Has anybody told them,” Vanya said, “that their name sounds like a shitty metal band?”

Allison ignored her and continued. “They’re headquartered in a disused subway station by the river here.” She pointed out the location on the map of the city’s south side tucked into the folder.

“Well, they were, but I bet you they’ve moved now,” Diego said. “They know the location is blown. I’ve seen some of them hanging out in the warehouses by Dunlap Street, but I don’t think that’s the home base either.”

“It’s a place to start.” Allison chewed on her lip.

A floorboard creaked somewhere above them. Diego froze, his eyes meeting Allison’s – he tried to ignore the jolt of nervousness he felt looking her in the eye – but there was no other sound. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Diego let go of Allison’s arm, which he hadn’t realized he’d grabbed, and closed his eyes again. Next to them, Vanya giggled.

“Is something funny?” Diego snapped.

Vanya shrugged. “It’s just… we’re sneaking around trying to steal something Pogo tried to give us eight hours ago.”

Diego opened his mouth to argue.

“You’ve got a point,” Allison said.

“It’s – I’m not letting Dad tell me what to do,” Diego muttered.

Vanya held up her hands. She’d gotten rid of her bangs since they were teenagers, and in the dim light her high forehead was white as the moon. “Hey, I’m here, too. I just want to make sure we’ve acknowledged what we’re doing.”

Something in Diego’s stomach clenched. “Hold on, there’s no ‘we.’ You’re going back to bed.”

Allison put her hand on Vanya’s shoulder. “He’s right. It could be dangerous.”

Another creak from upstairs made all three of them look up at the ceiling. Diego gathered the mission documents back into the folder and tucked the whole thing under his arm. He jerked his head to signal for the others to follow. Together, they crept into the hallway, windowless and still pitch black outside of a splash of grey light from Pogo’s office. Diego kept his hand against the wall and inched forward. Allison’s fingers rested lightly on the side of his shirt until their eyes adjusted and the shape of the hallway became clear ahead of them, an empty stretch of bleached tile. The warmth of Allison’s hand dropped away, and Diego turned around to make sure Allison and Vanya were still behind him. One sister, two sister, red sister, blue sister. When he turned back again, a figure in a yellow cocktail dress stood at the landing.

“Mom!” Diego forgot about aiming for stealth and rushed forward to throw his arms around Mom. She laughed – the laugh that, one day last year, Diego had heard coming out of a television playing at a diner and realized was copied exactly from June Cleaver on _Leave It To Beaver_. He hugged her tighter, so tightly it would probably hurt someone made of flesh and blood. She smelled of laundry detergent and rose perfume. Did she put that perfume on or somehow generate it? It didn’t matter. She was laughing again, and Diego was certain the laugh was different this time, a new rhythm right at the end.

“Hi, Mom,” Vanya said, behind him. Diego pulled himself out of Mom’s arms and coughed. He didn’t look back at Allison and Vanya.

Mom beamed at him, her hand warm in his. “And what did I do to deserve a hug like that?”

Allison approached, her brow furrowed. “Are you okay, Mom?”

“Never better. Who wants breakfast? I’ll make pancakes.”

“No, that’s okay,” Vanya said. “We’ll just grab something on our way out.”

“You’re leaving?”

Diego, Allison, and Vanya looked at each other.

“Vanya’s staying,” said Diego.

Vanya shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I – Diego.”

Diego turned back to Mom. “She’s staying.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Vanya said.

Mom put her hands on her hips. “Is that the kind of language we use in this house?”

“Sorry,” all three of them chorused. Looking at Mom, Diego could almost imagine that this was his home again, a thought that filled him with an unsettling mixture of comfort and panic. Mom hadn’t changed at all. It occurred to him that, someday, he would look older than her.

“Mom, you were – did Dad…” he began, unsure of how to word it. “How long have you been… asleep?”

Mom smiled again. “Not long. Come on, all of you need breakfast. You’re grumpy because you haven’t eaten.” She turned and headed toward the kitchen. Allison followed, then Vanya, and then Diego, not knowing what else to do. Mom’s skirt swished in front of them.

“It’s so fun to see my girls together again,” she said, twisting to put a hand on Allison’s arm. “And Diego, you look so handsome. What made you all decide to visit? It’s not my birthday, is it?”

“Mom, Luther died,” Allison said, but Mom had already walked on ahead, humming a tune that Diego didn’t recognize. Diego felt, suddenly, very alone. He peeled off at the foyer – Mom didn’t seem to notice – and pushed open the front door. Cool air rushed into his lungs. Morning traffic had begun; a passing car radio played a Rihanna song. He exhaled, almost laughing.

“Diego?”

He turned. Allison stood on the steps behind him, hugging herself against the chill. She came to stand next to him on the sidewalk. When they were kids, there had been another house across the street; now it was some kind of frou-frou hat shop for rich old ladies.

“Remember how mysterious it was?” Allison said.

“What, the world?”

“Mm.”

Diego smiled. “Yeah. I used to think everyone ate in cafeterias.”

“Pokemon,” Allison said. “I remember being fascinated by Pokemon. And then it turned out to be so stupid.”

Diego laughed. Allison smiled at her shoes. Across the street, a fat woman with red hair emerged from the hat shop, carrying a small white dog.

“Diego, are you afraid of me?” Allison breathed, barely audible. Diego didn’t move. He watched the red-haired lady walk down the street until she rounded the corner out of sight.

“If we’re going to do this,” he said, glancing quickly at Allison and then away. “You have to follow my lead.”

Allison shrugged in the corner of his eye. “Fine.”

“And we can’t let Vanya come with us.”

“I agree.”

He could feel Allison looking at him. Neither of them said anything else, and finally the wind turned colder, and Diego went back inside.


	11. Vanya

Vanya watched Mom pour pancake mix onto the griddle and stared at the bubbles the heat made in the batter. She closed her eyes and listened to the pancakes sizzling, knowing that Diego and Allison were leaving without her. She could have argued more, but the resolution she’d felt standing on the roof with Allison had drained out of her. It looked silly in the light of day. Mom flipped the pancakes, flawlessly, in the way Vanya had for years tried to emulate in the privacy of her own apartment but never managed to perfect. Vanya always splashed some of the batter or accidentally folded the pancake in half.

Mom ladled more batter out of the bowl. Vanya put a hand on her arm to stop her. 

“Mom, you don’t need to make so many,” she said. “Diego and Allison – and Klaus, they all left.”

Mom raised her eyebrows at Vanya. “What if they come back? I can’t have nothing to give them, now can I?”

Another set of pancakes were poured, flipped, and piled onto a plate. Golden brown. Round as full moons. Mom was humming again.

“Do you get bored here, by yourself?” Vanya asked. Stupid question. Denise said it was normal to have anthropomorphized Mom, but not healthy to keep doing so into adulthood. It was a coping mechanism, coping mechanism, everything she did was a coping mechanism.

“I’m not by myself, sweetheart,” Mom said. “I have all my children.”

“But none of us have lived here in years. And Ben… Luther…”

Mom clicked her tongue. “You and Klaus, always dwelling on stormclouds.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Now, how about a game of cribbage while we wait for the others?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks, Mom.”

“Well, play me something on the violin, then.”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

Mom sat down across from Vanya. “Not in the mood to play violin? Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I’m fine.”

“I could make you some cocoa–”

“I’m not ten, Mom.”

Mom actually looked hurt. “Alright, grumpy. We’ll just sit here and wait for your father to get back from California.”

Vanya frowned. “I thought he was in South America.”

“What? Oh, yes, that must be where he is. Silly me.”

Something turned over in Vanya’s gut. Her fingers twitched.

“Excuse me,” she said, and she pushed her chair aside and walked out of the room.

Mom called after her. “Are you alright, Vanya, sweetheart? Did you take your medication?” Vanya could hear the pancakes sizzling until she was halfway down the hallway.

“Pogo?” Vanya ducked her head into Pogo’s office, but it was empty. She checked the kitchen and the study, but he wasn’t there either. Finally, one of her calls was answered by a faint “Miss Vanya?” from the other side of the courtyard door. Vanya found Pogo sitting on the concrete bench overlooking the garden, hands resting on his cane. The autumn flowers weren’t as well-kept as they had once been – snakeroot and Michaelmas daisies and Chinese bellflower tangled purple and white all the way up to the hems of Ben’s bronze pants. Drifts of leaves had colonized the greenhouse through a broken window.

“I thought you had all gone,” Pogo said. He smiled at her.

Vanya looked at Ben’s statue, pupilless and beatific, and wondered if Dad would erect another next to it for Luther. Ben and Luther had not been close.

“Pogo, where’s Dad?” she asked.

Pogo laid his cane across his lap. “Your father will be back this afternoon.”

“But where is he? Is he in South America, or California?”

Pogo suddenly became very interested in a crow picking through the grass on the south side of the courtyard. A headache gathered behind Vanya’s eyes. She rubbed her face with her hand.

“I knew South America was too vague,” she said. “Why doesn’t he want us to know where he is?”

“Miss Vanya, you don’t need to concern yourself with your father’s business.”

“He’s lying to us.”

The crow ruffled its wings and cawed at Ben’s statue. Vanya glared at it. It let out another halfhearted screech, lifted itself into the air, and disappeared over the rooftop. When Vanya turned back to Pogo, he had wrapped both his hands around his cane, twisting them like he was wringing out a towel. Vanya sat next to him on the bench and put her hand on his sleeve. The crow’s caw hung in the air; Vanya had to resist the urge to put out her tongue and taste it. Sensory processing, coping, synthesesia, coping mechanism, when had she last taken a pill? Her fingers itched for her violin.

“Pogo,” she said. “What’s Dad not telling us?”


	12. Allison

It was noon by the time Diego and Allison made it to the neighborhood where Diego said he had seen members of the Brothers of the Void. When they were kids, they would have come up with some kind of dumb nickname for them, like the BOV, or the Brovoids, but now Diego just referred to them as “the cultists.” Otherwise, he still used all the vocabulary Dad had insisted on during their Academy days: military time, clock positions, and words like “recon” and “critical terrain.” Allison found she had trouble keeping up, but Diego chattered on without seeming to check whether or not she was listening. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him say so many words in a row before, except when Dad had made him read _Oliver Twist_ aloud to everyone after dinner. _To w-w-wit a w-w-w-w-workhouse._

“Diego, you can just point to things. Nobody’s watching us.” She interrupted his flow of instructions. They were crouched next to dumpster in an alley that opened up onto a business park and then several mail-order business warehouses with signs that looked like they’d been baking in the sun since the late 1980s. Every once in a while, the quiet was broken by the horn of a distant boat.

Diego shot her a look.

“The building at your ten is probably our way in,” he repeated. “Once we get in there, we can go up to the roof and we’ll be able to see into the–”

“Or I could just walk in,” Allison said. “Save us some time.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“Why is it a bad idea?”

“Because these people – they – Luther…” Diego shook his head. “They know that we’re involved. Maybe they’re ready for us. Maybe they were ready for him.”

Allison looked at the building Diego had indicated. A fading sign said Amazon Books Wholesale.

She shrugged. “Alright. Looks easy enough.”

They brushed themselves off and crossed the parking lot. Allison pictured Luther walking this same path alone, dwarfed by the sprawl of buildings. The Amazon warehouse had a set of garage doors – shut – and a metal door with an intercom, a pad for a keycard, and a buzzer.

“I can’t rumor anybody through the intercom,” Allison reminded Diego. Diego sighed and walked around to the side of the building. He clicked his tongue and pointed his thumb at a window, through which Allison could see a woman bent over a desk slapping stamps onto a series of papers. A window, Allison could work with. She knocked on the window. At first, the woman didn’t seem to hear, but after a second knock, she looked up and squinted at Allison through large glasses. She was short, with a sweater almost the same brown as her skin and at least three chunky necklaces made of what seemed to be seashells. Her hair was grey.

“Can I help you?” she shouted through the glass.

Allison put on her most winning smile and looked straight into the woman’s eye. Dad had always said that, technically, her facial expression and tone shouldn’t affect the strength of her powers, but Allison found that selling it helped her envision pushing the intent across the space between her and the other person.

“Hi,” she said, cheerfully. “I heard a rumor that we’re potential investors you’ve been expecting, and you forgot to let us in.” She held her breath. It had been a while since she’d done a compound rumor, and she wondered if she should have broken it down into parts and given each element – we’re investors, we’re expected, you forgot – time to sink in.

The chunky necklace lady put her fingers to her temples. “Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry. Come back around to the front. I’ll meet you at the door.”

As they walked back around the corner, Diego leaned over to her and whispered, “You don’t seem out of practice at all.” It didn’t feel like a compliment.

The door opened, and the woman waved the two of them in. “I apologize again. I must have had a senior moment.”

“Remind me of your name,” Allison said. Diego was looking around – clocking the exits and potential hiding places, she assumed.

“Lenore,” said the woman. “Would you like some tea or coffee, and then I can put together a tour of the warehouse floor?”

“Actually, Lenore, I heard a rumor that you wanted to take us up to the roof.”

Lenore paused. “Oh. Of course.”

They climbed through a series of stairwells until they reached a door that led back out into the midday sun.

“Thank you, Lenore,” Allison said. “I heard a rumor that you’re going to go back downstairs and forget we were ever here.”

Lenore smiled, patted Allison on the arm, and went back inside. Allison and Diego waited until the sound of her footsteps on the stairs faded to nothing. Diego put his hands on his hips – the action pushed his jacket back, and Allison could see the glint of his knives underneath – and laughed.

“I forgot how easy you make shit,” he said.

“Tell me you wouldn’t have knocked that woman unconscious if I wasn’t here.”

Diego produced a pair of binoculars from his jacket pocket and sat down on the edge of the roof that faced the river.

“You don’t have a pair of those for me, do you?”

Diego rolled his eyes. “If you wanted your own binoculars, you should have brought them.”

Allison sat down next to him and squinted at the building Diego was watching across the lot. It was slightly taller than the others but otherwise nondescript. Beyond it, a strip of blue – the river. Was there really a cult in there, up to nefarious deeds? Dad’s mission report had described a “biochemical substance, unknown but dangerous,” but hadn’t gone into much detail. Luther hadn’t lived long enough to report. Luther. She would never introduce him to her friends now. He’d never see the Pacific Ocean.

“We have movement,” Diego said. Allison grabbed the binoculars from him. He grabbed them back.

“Let me see. Come on, Diego.”

Diego surrendered the binoculars, and Allison peered through them at the building. At first, she didn’t see anything but a lot of brick, but after swinging the binoculars around for a second she saw movement through one of the windows on the upper floors and settled there. It was a man, bald, dressed in black, facing away from the window. He was disassembling something – a machine? Allison could only see a corner of it, but it reminded her of an old-fashioned printing press, with gears and sets of comblike teeth. The bald man removed pieces from the machine with a wrench and placed them into a series of wooden crates waiting in a row on the floor. As she watched, he turned to speak to someone she couldn’t see, and she caught a glimpse of the tattoo on the side of his neck: a solid black circle.

“They’re packing up to leave,” Allison said. She handed the binoculars back to Diego. He looked through them for another moment, then put them back into his pocket and turned to Allison.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s the plan: we – ” He stopped. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Shh.”

Allison listened. Faintly at first, then more distinctly, she heard it: footsteps on the stairs. More than one person. Three? Four? Her eyes met Diego’s, and they both scrambled to their feet. Allison’s heart pounded in her chest. She licked her lips.

“Is there another way down?” she asked. Diego shook his head.

Allison thanked God she’d had the presence of mind not to wear heels. “Some plan this was.”

The footsteps got closer and closer, and Allison found herself automatically settling into a Krav Maga stance she wouldn’t have expected she even remembered how to do. She and Diego edged closer together as the door burst open. More Brovoids, at least one cradling a black rifle.

Something in Allison’s mind clicked on. She charged the one holding the gun – a woman – hoping to get in past the barrel before the woman could aim. To her right, one of Diego’s knives buried itself in a shoulder; another found a leg just above the knee. Allison wrestled with the woman for the gun, which was thin-barrelled and surprisingly light. She managed to hook her ankle around the back of the woman’s knee and take her to the ground, her forearm pressed under the woman’s chin, but before she could get out a rumor a pair of arms wrapped around her from behind and dragged her backwards – her feet skidded on the gravel as she tried to resist – the headlock was preventing her from speaking – black spots appeared in her vision –

The grip went slack. Allison sucked in a lungful of air and untangled herself from the attacker, who slumped over, a silver knife protruding from his back. The blood looked cherry red in the midday sun.

Diego nodded at her. Allison looked around at the pile of unconscious or whimpering goons on the ground. Her chest pumped up and down. She tried not to smile, but it happened anyway, and Diego returned it, his face boyish again.

Then he lurched sideways as if something had hit him and fell, skidding three feet along the gravel.

“Diego!” Allison screamed. “What the–”

A boot collided with her stomach, or at least that’s what it felt like – there was nothing there that she could see. Her diaphram seized up from the impact, and she swung her arms out wildly, wheezing. Her fingers brushed something solid, but couldn’t grab hold. She spun on her knees, watching for disturbances in the gravel. There! The rifle, abandoned on the ground, twitched, then rose into the air – Allison still couldn’t breathe properly – she heard a pop and felt a sting in the left side of her chest. She looked down; a silver dart about three inches long quivered under her collarbone. She looked for Diego, but didn’t see him. The world slid out of focus.

“Motherfucker,” Allison mumbled, and then everything went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Internet doesn't seem to exist in the Umbrella Academy universe, so Amazon is a dinky mail-order book business. Take that, Jeff Bezos.


	13. Klaus

“Have you ever fasted?” 

Klaus looked up from his vanilla-and-chocolate swirl with a peanut butter shell. “Have I ever not eaten for an extended period of time? Sure. But not, like, on purpose.” 

They were walking along the pier. In direct sunlight, Payam tended to disappear if Klaus looked directly at him, but Klaus kept catching glimpses of him out of the corner of his eye. Payam had (he _had_ had) a nice profile, with a moody sort of brow and a nose that curved abruptly down at the end, like it had changed its mind. Klaus kept thinking about Payam’s hands, his calloused fingers, how they must have looked curled around a paintbrush or sorting through scraps of blue paper for his octopus. Would they have been warm or cold? Clammy or dry? 

“Being a ghost is like… you’re fasting, like for Ramadan, but it’s…” Payam was saying. “The sun just never goes down. And you’re stuck in this… hunger that goes on and on.” 

“Are you trying to make it hard to enjoy my ice cream?” 

“Sorry.” 

Klaus frowned at his cone, made a face, then tossed it into the nearest trashcan. “I’m watching my figure anyway.” 

Payam snorted. When Klaus turned to look at him, but he faded to a shimmer in the air. 

“So, what’s this sister of yours like?” Klaus asked, turning forward again. “Is she hot?” He took the envelope containing the letter that Payam had dictated to him out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers. Around them, people were strolling, laughing, trying to keep their hair from blowing into their faces while they snapped photos of each other by the water. This would probably be one of the last summery days of the year. The sun was bright enough to make Klaus squint. 

“Ew,” Payam said. “No, she’s… I thought she was a pain in the ass when we were kids, but she’s grown up to be really cool. She’s way smarter than me, and she actually cares about things. She does all this activism stuff.” 

“Yeah, well, the grass is always greener from the other side of the veil.” Klaus wondered if Luther had a rosier view of him now, from his new perspective as a dead person. Ben, too. Oh, Klaus was actually cool after all. The way he sold my records for weed money when we were fourteen was adorable in retrospect.

“Maybe,” Payam said. Klaus watched a woman with long box braids jump up and down at the sight of a second woman coming around the corner. They danced at each other, a secret handshake at a distance, and giggled. He wanted to run up to the woman and shake her and scream that her friend or her sister or her girlfriend was going to die, and so was she. All they were was pre-dead. The air they were breathing was full of dead people’s recycled oxygen. Couldn’t they feel it? God, his whole body hurt. He needed a drink. He needed a pharamacy of pills.

“You okay?” Payam asked. Klaus coughed. 

“So, I’ve been wondering something,” he began, mostly to change the subject. “Will was going through your clothes. And the murderer stole the clothes you were wearing that night, right?” 

“Yeah, he must have.” 

“So… what’s so great about your clothes? Are they lined with precious gems or something? Because if so, I’d like to get in on that, please and thank you.” The two women disappeared into a shop. Klaus felt oddly bereft.

“I have no idea. I buy clothes at the Goodwill.” Klaus heard Payam frown more than he saw it. “You don’t think Will is involved, do you?” 

Klaus made a circle out of his hand and held it to his eye like a monocle. He put on an English accent. “I have eliminated no suspects.” 

Payam’s laugh mingled with the wind. “I thought you weren’t helping me solve my murder.” 

“Yeah, well. I’m bored.” They came up to an empty bench, and Klaus flopped down onto it. He closed his eyes. Diego would be better at this. He loved playing detective. Klaus wondered what Diego and the girls were doing right now – probably getting into a pointless screaming match with Dad, provided Reggie had deigned to show up. 

“Okay,” Klaus said, straightening up on the bench. “The clothes you’re wearing right now. The ones you manifested, or whatever. Is that what you were wearing when you bit it?” 

“Um. No, actually.” 

“Okay, so, that’s a clue.” 

“Is it?” 

“I don’t know. Work with me here.” 

“Fine.” He thought for a second. “Ok, I’m pretty sure this what I was wearing last week when a weird guy tried to buy my jacket off me.” 

Klaus snapped his fingers. “Aha! See?” 

“Klaus, I don’t think I was murdered for my jacket. Anyway, I gave it to Noor after because the sleeves were kind of too short for me.” 

Klaus held up Payam’s letter with a flourish. “Good thing we’re going to see her, then.” 

This time, Klaus actually bought a subway ticket, with a couple bucks out of the $52 he’d taken out of an envelope taped to the underside of Payam’s bed. It was Payam’s emergency money, but Payam wouldn’t be having emergencies anymore, so he’d said Klaus could have it. 

“This is so legitimate,” Klaus whispered to Payam as they went through the turnstile. His smiled his most pleasant smile at the cop lurking by the end of the platform. The cop narrowed her eyes at him. “It feels dirty.” 

Payam rolled his eyes. “Well, you’re still sneaking me in, technically.” 

“Once again, you don’t count, deadboy. Oh, I can see you better now. Look at the jacket.” 

Payam wiggled out of his jacket and held it in front of him on one finger. There was a patch on the left elbow, handsewn. Klaus still thought it looked familiar. “It’s just a jacket.” 

“What’s the brand?” 

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say.” 

“How can it not say?” 

“I think it only looks how I remember, and I don’t remember what the tag looked like.” 

Klaus groaned. “You are so not helpful.” 

The subway ride to BIT was only 20 minutes, but Klaus fell asleep in his seat almost immediately, his chin lolling to his chest. He didn’t dream. Payam woke him when they were rolling into the station by shouting his name, which made Klaus jump, which made several other people in the car jump. 

“Boo!” Klaus wiggled his fingers at a father and child across from him beforre he swept out onto the platform. 

It had been a long time since Klaus had been on the BIT campus. He’d never been one for frat parties, though he had at one point had a dealer who was a student there in some field Klaus couldn’t pronounce. They used to meet by the loading dock for the East Cafeteria. He remembered the poplar tree by the driveway and the ghost of a suicide who would sit swinging her legs over the stone wall above it, blowing bubblegum. Everybody was stressed out at BIT. It had what Maude would call “bad vibes.” 

They came up on the dreary library building. 

“What is it with schools and brutalist architecture?” Klaus muttered. 

Payam stopped and put his hands on his hips. 

“What?” Klaus asked. 

“I hope she hasn’t gone home yet.” 

“Why would she go home?” 

Payam blinked at him. 

“Oh,” said Klaus. “Right. How do we find her?” 

“Her dorm’s this way.” 

“Oh, so I’m supposed to just accost her in her dorm, am I?” Klaus sputtered. “If I get arrested–” 

“Oh, just come on.” 

At Noor’s dorm building – another concrete monstrosity – Klaus leaned against the wall by the door until he could slip in after someone and prayed there wasn’t a security camera. Noor lived on the second floor, Room #26B. Construction paper cut-out letters on the door spelled out “NOOR AND JESSICA!” Another piece of paper underneath them said “don’t dead open inside.” Klaus looked at Payam, made a face, then knocked. Nothing. He tried the door. Locked. 

“I guess she’s out,” he said. 

“Hello?” a high, hoarse voice behind him said.

Klaus whirled around and found himself face to face with a small woman, he’d guess only slightly taller than Vanya, with curly hair fighting the confines of a pair of French braids and eyes the same gray as Payam’s. _Thoughtful_ , he’d call them, or even _stormy_ , if he wanted to go full harlequin novelist. Her eyeliner was smudged on one side, and in her left hand, dangling at her side, was a truly pathetic-looking turkey sandwich in a plastic box. She looked at him like one might look at a possom they’d encounted in the bathroom. 

Klaus turned to Payam for help and found only empty hallway where he had been. Now? Seriously? He spun around, but there was no sign of the guy. He resisted the impulse to call out for him. 

“Uh, I, well…” Klaus coughed. “Are you Noor, by any chance? Payam’s sister?” 

She narrowed her eyes. “Yeah?” 

Klaus laced his fingers together in front of him. He cleared his throat. “Hi. How are you? Don’t answer that. I’m sorry I asked. I have something of your brother’s that he, uh, had given to me to give you… ages ago, and I forgot. I was a friend of his. I thought you might want it now, given the, uh… here.” 

He held out the envelope with a mercifully steady hand. She frowned at it. Oh, God, Klaus thought. Please don’t cry. If you cry, I’ll cry. Noor looked back at his face. She studied him for what felt like a long time.

“Are you Klaus Hargreeves?” she asked. 

“Ah, fuck.” Klaus hit himself in the face with the letter. “No?” 

“You are.” 

“No, I’m not.” 

“Yes, you are.” 

Klaus held out the envelope again. “Just take the fucking letter.” 

Noor reached out and took the letter from him. She stared at it for a second, then tucked her sandwich under her arm so she could unlock the door to her room. Klaus lingered in the hallway, looking around again for Payam, who still did not appear, then followed her in, uncertain what else to do. 

The room was shadowy, the shades drawn, and if Payam was there, Klaus couldn’t see him. Noor dropped down onto edge of the bed like she’d been carrying a load. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Klaus looked at the ceiling, then at the floor. He made weird eye contact with a poster of Angela Davis over the desk. After another moment of rolling on the balls of his feet, he sat down on Noor’s roommate’s bed, which groaned under his weight. Noor’s shoulders shuddered. 

“I’m really bad at grief,” Klaus said. The statement rolled into the space between them and lay there. Jessica had a bedspread with cupcakes on it, and a matching pillow. Klaus picked at a loose thread in it. Noor sniffed and coughed. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. 

“Why are you here?” she asked. “Did you really know him when he was… before this?” 

It seemed wrong to say, I hooked up with him at a party and then was passed out while he was stabbed to death by an invisible man in a bathroom, so Klaus just shook his head. 

Noor’s eyes filled with tears again. “Can – can you see him right now?” 

Klaus shook his head again.

“Can you… call him up?” 

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

Klaus rubbed his eyes with his hands. It soothed his headache a little. “Because that’s not how it works.” 

“How does it work?” 

“Not like that.” 

“Please, he’s my brother.” 

Klaus stood up. “I’m not Dial-A-Ghost. I can’t just conjure whoever I want whenever I want.” He paced from one end of the room to the other. 

“Sorry,” Noor said. “Thanks – for the letter.” She hadn’t opened it. Klaus went to the door, intending to storm out, but a dull green jacket hanging from the hook on the back of the door caught his eye. He snatched it and held it out in front of him. It was strange to see the jacket he’d been looking at Payam wearing all day without Payam in it. He hadn’t been able to tell how soft it was from just looking at it, any stiffness worn away through years of wear. Payam hadn’t been murdered for this. It was just a jacket, cheap, lined with faux fur, like a kid might wear. The zipper was wonky. Klaus leaned his forehead against the door and exhaled. He tossed the jacket onto Noor’s bed and pulled open the door. 

“Wait, where are you going?” Noor followed him out into the hallway. Her footsteps were soft on the carpet. 

“If anybody asks, I was never here,” Klaus called back to her. In the common room at the end of the hall, the phone on the wall rang, once, twice, three times. There was a pile of sweatshirts on the couch that as Klaus and Noor got closer revealed itself to be a sleeping person, but they didn’t stir. 

“No. No, if he appeared to you, it was for a reason,” Noor was saying.

“Says who?” 

Noor blocked his path to the door, her hand out in front of her, hovering in front of his sternum. _Stop! In the name of love…_ Klaus supressed a giggle. “Do you know who did it?” The phone continued to ring. 

“No, and it’s none of my business – is anybody going to get that?” 

The sleeping student jerked awake, rubbed their eyes, and picked up the phone. 

“Thank you,” Klaus said. “Now, if you’ll get out of my way–” 

“Uh, guy in leather pants? It’s for you.” 

Klaus and Noor turned to the kid on the couch, who was holding the receiver out to Klaus. 

“What do you mean, it’s for me?” Klaus said. 

They shrugged. “Lady’s looking for a guy in leather pants.” 

Back in the Academy days, Dad had had the ability to track the children no matter where they went, but he’d never revealed exactly how he did it. Klaus had been to half a dozen legitimate doctors and twice as many quacks trying to find evidence of a chip somewhere inside of him, but none of them had ever found anything. Eventually, Klaus had almost managed to forget about it. On an optimistic day, he’d tell himself that Dad had probably stopped, out of the bare minimum of respect for his estranged adult children. On a pessimistic day, he’d take a long walk through the park in the shape of a mile-long penis.

Klaus took the receiver and held it to his ear. “Mom?” 

“Klaus!” It wasn’t Mom. It was– “It’s Vanya.” Her voice sounded tinny and far away. 

“Vanya? What’s going on? How did you–” 

“Listen, I’m calling you from–” The sound cut out. “–It’s a cult. Dad didn’t want us to know. They’re trying to bring him back to life. They tried with objects, but it wasn’t–” Static. “Allison and Diego went after them. They don’t–” 

“Bring who back to life? Van, I can’t hear you properly,” Klaus said. He mentally ticked down the list of what he remembered from the old rogues’ gallery. Of the ones who were dead, plenty had had their share of fanatics. God, Dad was probably loving this. Well, if Allison and Diego wanted to get themselves killed going after some undead asshole looking for revenge, that was their fucking business. 

“Klaus,” Vanya said. “I don’t think it’s what he would have wanted. I don’t think he’ll be the same.” 

“What are you talking about?” Klaus felt a curdling in his stomach, but his thoughts seemed to have flatlined. Vanya was still talking, but the connection was boiling her voice, and he couldn’t understand any of it. 

“Hold on a second, would you, Vanya,” he murmured, and, only half aware of what he was doing, he dropped the receiver, which landed on the floor with a clunk, and ran back to Noor’s room, ignoring her hissed “What the _fuck_!” as she followed him. He rounded the doorway, found Payam’s jacket where he’d tossed it on Noor’s bed, and turned it over to look at the lining. There, near the collar, under the tag that Payam hadn’t considered important enough to remember, were two initials sewn in Mom’s flawless embroidery: _BH_.

Klaus interlocked his fingers on the back of his head. “Shit. I’m sorry. I'm-” What a stupid thing to die for. He tried to ignore the little voice in his head that had begun to repeat with every beat of his heart: _Ben, Ben, Ben._ Luther would solve this, except that he wouldn’t, had already tried, never would again. 

“I’m sorry." He was saying it to Noor now, because Payam was still nowhere to be seen. He reached out with his mind, like Dad had always tried to tell him to do, but there was no Payam, no Ben, no Luther, no anyone, anywhere. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the inconsistent updates.


End file.
